I’ve been working in the media in Ireland for over thirty years. How did I get to the stage where I was considering writing on Substack?
When I started out as a vet in the early nineties, I wrote pet vet columns in local and national newspapers, as well as doing radio and tv work.
Then the internet arrived, and soon I was busy engaging on social media, with an active Facebook page and a Twitter feed.
Then five years ago, around the same time as COVID, my work in print media largely dried up, as did my television work. It felt like some type of major reset was happening.
Instagram and Tiktok became the flavour of the era, and although I set up profile pages, I found it difficult to adapt to them naturally. It takes serious time and focus to build these areas, and this was challenging for me. It felt like I was only half way there, and younger vets seemed to be better than me at ticking all the necessary high energy boxes.
Now, in 2026, it feels like there has been another shift for people like myself. I have moved into partial retirement in my clinical work (four mornings a week these days) so I have more free time. I would like to spend more of my time expressing myself through writing. I still struggle with the high octane work for the Instagram/Tiktok playing field, but I have found myself intrigued by Substack.
Substack was founded in 2017 as an alternative publishing model, to help independent writers share their work directly to readers for free, but also through paid subscriptions, instead of via a third party such as a newspaper website. Now over 17000 creators earn money through their Substack writing, with over fifty million subscriptons across their network, of which five million are paid. This isn’t a big earner for most creators: around half of the writers earn less than €500 a year. But it does offer the opportunity to have a place where writing can be shared to enthusiastic readers, and if your writing is appealing enough, you might get paid for it.
So I have set up a Substack page, and I am aiming to post to it regularly. You can read my first article here.
This “Pete the Vet” website will continue, as ever, as a summary and guide to all the stuff that I do, everywhere. I will post links here to my Substack work as it happens. But if you just want to read the specific Substack artcles that I write, head straight to https://petewedderburn.substack.com/
Please note that I am unable to answer veterinary questions in comments. If you have questions or concerns about your pet's health it is always better to contact your vet.