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Fox News Report on vets

Joined Apr 2009
143 Posts | 0+
Cedar, MN
A news report was given on the national as well as the local level yesterday. The report was about the concern for large animal vets in rural areas. It seems that many of our large animal vets will be retiring in the next 10-15 years and the new vets to replace them are not choosing to work in rural areas on large animals. These new vets would rather stay in more populated towns and work on small animals such as pets. How many of these vets that do choose to work on large animals will not be willing to tackle the chore of deer?



I have seen this problem in my area the last couple of years. We are on the verge as an industry of having a better way of testing our animals for TB with the new TB blood test. Without the vet to perform this new test we could be seeing just another way to put farmers out of business. This report was given since it may affect our countrys' food supply. I also received an e-mail recently that McDonalds is going to be importing beef from South America because of a lack of supply of US beef. Maybe the two reports go hand-in hand. I would appreciate replys on this thread.
 
We can not get vets to visit farms here now. They all want to groom pets. The law has hurt us with the vets because if he makes a visit he is required to have all the portable equipment necessary to care for the animal. This includes xray equipment which most vets can not justify the expense for all the portable equipment required by law.
 
This is in part due to the fact these small animal vets can make so much more money than large animal vets since they can get all of the animals brought to them . It really is like rural doctors they just can not make as much as their city counterparts . We have the same problem here too out of all our large animal vets only about three will even deal with deer and that is in one state . I guess it is time for me to go back to collage .
 
I guess I am in a rare area. I live near a small town about 5,000 people. The entire county is only about 25,000 people, Iam told there are more cows here than people. Within 30 miles, there are 5 or 6 large animal vets, one of which has a daughter about to finish vet school and help him. A few of the local vets have cattle, so that helps too. I think part of the problem is the vet schools. They only allow so many people in, they should allow in so many large animal and so many small animal. Oklahoma is cow country, I think as long as we have cows, we will have vets.
 
What we did several summmers is have vet students work on our farm for a month or two. We would do this about the time the fawns were arriving. If we didn't have enough work for them they were able to work with our regular vet at their office. We live in a rural area and our vet was worried about getting younger vets to take over whenever he retires. One of the vets that worked with us now is a full time vet in that practice. Another works elsewhere in the state but does service deer farms. We hoped to encourage just that. Even those vets that are going into large animal are primarily equine - even in a dairy state like Wisconsin! Also, the majority in vet school these days are female. If they have no exposure to farming that certainly isn't the path they choose. Also, vet schools barely touch on deer - so it is strictly learn as you go.