Sunday, March 10, 2019

Baxter Black: The Rookie DVM

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:

drjohn said...

More than likely to be a female that really loooves horses