Dr Alex Crow

Alex graduated from the Royal Veterinary College in 2019 and has spent the seven years since in a range of small animal practices. He is registered with the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons. His clinical interests are nutrition and dermatology, which between them account for a large share of what a small animal vet actually sees.

In 2024 he was named one of the top thirty veterinary professionals under thirty at the London Vet Show, in the 30under30 awards.

Alongside practice he is Chief Veterinary Officer at The Net Vet and Official Vet for the pet food brand Pooch & Mutt, where the role covers both making educational content and advising the company on its products and how it markets them.

The teaching came first. He has always liked being an educator, whether that was teaching vet students in practice or explaining the latest bit of chemistry to friends at school, and the content work grew out of that. It started when Pooch & Mutt found his personal Instagram account and asked whether he had thought about making videos. He had not. By his own account the early ones were terrible, but they were liked enough to continue, and he set up his own account not long after. He has since written hundreds of blog articles and built an audience of around 200,000 across Instagram and TikTok as @alex_thevet.

What he makes now is largely responsive. He finds a video of someone doing something questionable to an animal and answers it: what is happening, whether the evidence supports it, and what an owner should actually look for. The method behind it is consistent, and he applies it to himself as much as to anyone else. Is there a study to back this up? Is there evidence it could hurt animals? Does the animal in the video look like it is suffering?

That puts him against a lot of confident, unqualified advice, and he is clear-eyed about the odds. There is excellent content from vets, veterinary nurses and behaviourists, and there is a great deal of dangerous content from people whose only qualification is a loud voice and an engaging manner. The platforms reward the second kind, because shocking content travels further than accurate content. He describes it as a never-ending battle whose only real aim is to outnumber the bad advice.

The subjects he comes back to are the ones owners are most often misled about: raw feeding and the difference between producers who test their food and those who do not, homeopathic flea and worm remedies with no evidence behind them, vaccine misinformation, and the health consequences of breeding dogs to look a certain way. On the questions that reach him through The Net Vet and social media, it is the everyday clinical picture: itchy skin and allergies, lumps and bumps, upset stomachs, ear infections and, increasingly, owners who have recognised their pet is overweight and want help.

His answer to most of it is the same, and it is not the answer that gets shared. Advice on the internet cannot see your animal. On anything that matters, speak to your own vet and get something tailored to the pet in front of you.