Why anesthetic protocols do not travel intact: hidden curriculum and local reasoning in small-animal veterinary...

In small-animal veterinary anesthesia, protocols, standard combinations, and dose-based practical aids are highly visible parts of the educational and clinical landscape. This visibility is not inherently problematic, because protocol-like structures can improve efficiency and provide workable starting points. However, in dogs and cats, where care often allows repeated observation, incremental adjustment, and response-guided modification, quality depends heavily on patient-specific interpretation and management. In that setting, protocol dependence becomes especially problematic. This article advances three related claims. First, protocol dependence describes a drift in which a starting framework comes to stand in for patient-specific anesthetic thinking. Second, this problem can be interpreted through the lens of hidden curriculum: protocol-shaped educational units may remain more portable than the reasoning formally endorsed. Third, anesthetic protocols can be understood as local organizational instruments, so protocols borrowed from external experts do not necessarily travel intact across institutions, a problem this article refers to as protocol transplantation. The argument is not that protocols should be abandoned. Rather, protocols should be repositioned as scaffolds for local, patient-specific reasoning rather than treated as portable finished products. Improving small-animal anesthesia will require not only better protocols, but more explicit teaching of how anesthetic plans are interpreted, revised, and locally enacted.