How many of you have ever had a new veterinarian out to your place? You think you're scared!
One
of the hazards of a livestock veterinary practice is that it is the one
specialty in vet medicine where the client almost always knows more
than the new graduate veterinarian! Ya, see, in vet school we spent
years learning diseases and treatments. We were taught hundreds of
possible ailments that might afflict yer critters.
By
the time we finally escape and are turned loose on the unsuspecting
public, we are bursting with knowledge. They've packed it in our brains
like sand in a rat hole! Only problem is, we haven't figgered out which
diseases get priority when we're tryin' to come up with a diagnosis.
Say
I was lookin' at a feedlot steer with a swollen foot. My brain would be
swimmin' with possibilities – ergot, frost bite, fractured sesamoids,
BVD, corns…While I'm sifting my computer-like memory bank for tests to
run to determine how to diagnose the limping steer, the feedlot cowboy
is shuffling his feet. It's the third steer like this he's pulled this
week and the 99th one he's seen in the last five years. He knows what it
is. The odds are in his favor.
Or
the rancher with an Anaplasmosis cow. He's seen hundreds of them. The
new vet's never seen one! Same with Erysipelas in hogs or bumblefoot in
sheep.
New livestock vets learn a lot their first year, thanks to the kindness and patience of many livestock producers.
1 comment:
More than likely to be a female that really loooves horses
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