Four documents — a twenty-page summary deck, two technical white papers, and a plain-language open call — set out a complete, costed construction plan for an independent veterinary credentialing system, governed by the state licensing boards themselves.
The North American Veterinary Ethics Council (NAVEC) has published Build the Alternative: blueprints for two independent institutions that veterinary medicine currently lacks, designed on the governance models the neighboring licensed professions already use.
The first is an Examination Council — a national licensing examination governed by the state boards on the member-board model nursing has used for decades: an eleven-seat board under a Delegate Assembly of regulators, a 300-item examination built to the joint national testing Standards, annual technical reports and independent scoring audits required by bylaw, and a published fee schedule launching at $450–495 against the NAVLE’s $825 for the 2026–27 cycle. The second is a Credentials Commission for foreign-trained graduates, adapted from the independent commission human medicine has operated since 1956, with primary-source verification and all-in candidate costs of $2,000–3,500 (estimated).
The papers put the default construction schedule at nine to twelve months to first administrations, with a six-month emergency minimum whose tradeoffs are stated plainly and a thirty-six-month development program beyond launch. They also carry an implementation-status notice on their opening pages: these are policy blueprints, not existing institutions, and NAVEC will not own, govern, contract with, or financially benefit from anything proposed — it holds no seat, no veto, no contract, and no financial interest.
Three adoption pathways are developed: state-by-state acceptance through ordinary board rulemaking; full succession by the boards collectively; and an enforcement-triggered transition that applies only if a court order, consent decree, federal agency action, or Attorney General enforcement action were ever to make continued reliance on the incumbent examination unlawful or indefensible — in which case, the papers show, licensure continues uninterrupted through permits, supervised practice, and emergency rules while examination-based licensure resumes.
All four documents are available at navec.org/build, and the underlying public record is indexed in Research.
The blueprints propose institutions; they do not assert wrongdoing by any organization. Contested characterizations in the underlying public record are attributed to the filings and reporting that made them. NAVEC is a nonprofit and uses only public, citable data; nothing here is legal advice.
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