Veterinarians for large animals becoming scarce

by Heather B. Hayes
for Virginia Business
August 2006

Fifty years ago, the average veterinarian lived in a rural area, drove a pickup truck and worked primarily on cows, pigs, sheep and horses. Not anymore. The U.S. is turning out fewer and fewer veterinarians working on large animals, and the scarcity is particularly critical among food-supply animal practitioners.

A recent study conducted by Kansas State University’s College of Business Administration found that for every 100 food-supply veterinary jobs available over the next 10 years, there will be only 96 veterinarians available to fill them. The reasons behind the shortfall include the decreasing number of veterinary students choosing to practice in the fields of food-supply specialties and various socio-economic trends, including further declines in rural populations.

Virginia is not nearly as hard hit by the shortage as the Midwest, the heart of the livestock industry, but the trend could still negatively affect the livestock farms, food safety, public health and biosecurity, according to Grant Turnwald, associate dean of academic affairs of the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine at Virginia Tech.

His biggest concern would be if an emerging disease like foot-and-mouth disease, mad cow or avian flu finds its way into a herd but is not recognized in a timely manner. “The worst-case scenario would be the farmer who sees a cow salivating, assumes she’s just got a burr or sticker in her mouth and doesn’t call in a veterinarian because it’s too much of a hassle,” he says. “But what if it turns out to be foot-and-mouth disease?

It’s crucial that a diagnosis is established early before the disease spreads, as indeed it happened in Britain before they really got on top of it.”

The most immediate impact is that it’s just one more hardship for the farmers, says Mark Cramer, a spokesperson for the Virginia Farm Bureau, who notes that the southwestern region and some pockets of south-central Virginia are already feeling the effects of the shortage.

As the shortage gets more acute, he says, livestock farmers are bracing for veterinary prices to rise. “Right now, they’re dealing with high costs for fuel and fertilizer, but in the future, veterinary services could be just one more thing that’s going to weigh heavily on their bottom line,” Cramer says.

For its part, Virginia Tech is already working to influence its veterinary students to consider a career as a food-supply animal veterinarian. The school now provides recruiting scholarships for students interested in food- animal medicine, as well as aquaculture, and now offers a food-animal specialty track. Faculty also are putting extra after-hours time into the school’s Food Animal Club and providing plenty of hands-on activities for members, such as palpating cows for pregnancy.

The real challenge, though, is not getting students but keeping students, says Turnwald. “A lot of them, even the farm kids, see the better standard of living and the lifestyle they can have working in a small-animal practice in a metropolitan area, and then decide they’d rather have that,” he says.