As a pet owner, you've likely encountered situations where your furry friend needs veterinary care, and you have been asked to consent to a treatment or surgery on your pet’s behalf. Vets must obtain informed consent before proceeding, ensuring owners understand the treatment, risks, alternatives and costs.

There are different types of owner consent. Informed consent is where the vet explains the treatment, including risks and alternatives, and the owners agree to the treatment plan or surgery.

Implied consent is used in emergency situations where owners can't be reached, but there is a general awareness of how the treatment should proceed; vets imply what an owners wishes would likely be based on experience and previous outcomes.

Written consent is a formal agreement for complex procedures or final treatments such as euthanasia.

The challenge in veterinary medicine is that the animals themselves cannot verbalise their consent, but does this mean that they have no choice in how they are treated?

For those of us that pay attention, the answer is clear, and whether an animal agrees or does not is written all over them.

Vets often use behavioural cues (like a pet's comfort level) to gauge stress or willingness and adapt their care accordingly. Animals cannot give informed, legal, or explicit consent in the human sense because they lack the capacity to understand future consequences, risks, and benefits.

However, animals express preferences, assent (agreement), or dissent (resistance) through behaviour, such as approaching or moving away. They can signal willingness to participate in interactions like petting or training.

Communicating approval or disapproval is often called “consent testing” in animal welfare. Animals commonly show they do not consent through fear, aggression, fleeing, or resistance, which should be respected to avoid unnecessary suffering.

So why does consent matter? Consent is key to protecting animal welfare, and it ensures that what we are doing to animals, or asking of them, is in the animal’s best interests. For instance, if you buy a lovely new outfit for your pet to wear and he instantly tears a hole in it, it is likely he is not consenting to wearing clothes and you should probably listen to him.

Giving animals choice and listening to the answer is important to their quality of life. However, there are times that we must do things that they don’t like, such as giving injections or trimming nails. In these cases, it is important to make these experiences as comfortable for your pet as possible, and do the prior training needed to help them to comply with these necessary but less well-tolerated requests.

There are many things that we ask our pets to consent to in their daily life, such as crate training, car rides, leash walking and clothing, as well as more occasional consents such as travel, grooming and veterinary care.

It is important that we approach all these consents from the animal’s perspective, considering if you are asking them to consent for their wellbeing or for your own convenience or entertainment.

As vets, it is vital that we always put the animals’ needs first and advocate on their behalf, even if it is upsetting and emotional for their owners to hear.

In a world where everything is possible, it is important to understand that just because we can, doesn’t always mean we should, and having our animal’s consent is ever more important.

• Lucy Richardson graduated from Edinburgh University in 2005. She started CedarTree Vets in August 2012 with her husband, Mark. They live at the practice with their two children, Ray and Stella, and their dog and two cats. She is also the FEI national head veterinarian for Bermuda