If you put an animal on a ventilator then you can control all aspects of its ventilation and oxygenation. But it requires at least heavy sedation and usually anaesthesia. And you then become an essential part of the animal’s major body systems! You now have control of its life. Usually this means that there must be someone with the animal 100% of the time. And you have to know how to ventilate and as importantly how to troubleshoot when problems occur like leaks, blockages, fighting the ventilator, or the dreaded ventilator induced lung injury, pneumonia and pneumothorax . Even with the best planning and oversight, problems usually do occur in some shape or form.If you are ventilating an animal because it has respiratory paralysis (eg snake bites) then survival rates can be very good. But if you are forced to ventilate an animal because it has severe lung disease and hypoxia that doesn’t respond to oxygen supplementation then you are looking at poor survival rates, something like 10-20%. So while ventilation is a very doable part of critical care, the decision to ventilate a veterinary patient should not be taken lightly.