It really sucks, my goat vet isn’t taking new clients. She’s already stretched thin and will now have to carry more meds or provide prescriptions. I have her out once a year just to make sure I stay on her client list in case of an emergency and it’s a 3-4 week wait for a regular visit. She’s been very good at being able to tell me what to go get and the dose but now she’s going to have to provide it. Never mind that almost everything for goats is off label because they’re not a big enough industry for fda testing.
If your vet can call in a prescription to your local store, she won’t have to make a trip to you to dispense it or keep extra stock.
The regulation change certainly does put a strain on already over-worked vets.
Most vets I’ve heard opinions from on the topic agree with the change. But the reality is for stretched-thin large animal vets, it’s going to eat up more of their precious little time.
On the flip side, I’ve heard food animal vets have a hard time qualifying for the student loan forgiveness programs designed to attract food animal vets because you can’t demonstrate enough earnings treating food animals. Maybe this will help?
Certainly a tangent from the OP here, but perhaps the large animal vet profession should be a bit easier to attain. The difficulty of getting in and the debt has certainly been enough to turn me away from a career I once wanted…
Easier how?
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I don’t have a good answer to that. The very few slots available nation wide is intimidating and daunting. I have a friend who had a better GPA than I, hundreds of shadowing hours, well rounded, and seemed to have everything put together. She applied to 14 schools and was waitlisted to 1. We hear all about shortages of large animal vets, but every time I try to entertain applying, it looks impossible and so exclusive. I don’t have a good answer…
This is a good point. When I started undergrad in 2002, I was an equine science major/bio major with the want to go to vet school. Ive always been a decent student, but never a 4.0 student and two semesters of organic chemistry were enough to make me realize that there was no way I’d be competitive enough to get into vet school with Ohio State really being my only option. I am also a WRETCHED test taker. With something like 30 vet schools in the US and it being nearly impossible to get into another states if your state has one was daunting.
I just googled and in 2018 there were 3000 veterinarians that graduated in the US. It didn’t differentiate between large and small animal. That’s not a lot. Neither is 30 vet programs in the entire US. I do feel that if there were more programs, there would be more students even if they still held the very high entrance standards. A lot of my peers in college that did go to vet school, went the island route in St. Kitts; easier to get in.
I also thought about the vet tech route, but everything at that time pointed to it not being a very lucrative option and it being very demanding for the pay.
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But this school is also the most expensive to attend; I guess there’s a trade off there.
I had a bad freshman year that has followed me, so I wasn’t a 4.0 student but had good grades in what I’ve been told matters. I attended an application briefing for my closest school, and while they are touting that they want a “well rounded student” rather than placing all the emphasis on GPA, my friend (who is well rounded) was unable to get in with north of a 3.6. My 3.2 certainly can’t compete, even though I’m pretty confident that I could make it.
Based on the vets I’ve used over the years that are fresh out of school, it would seem that they are in fact still taking the high GPA students that are highly book smart and less street smart; vets who don’t know how to handle and work around horses, seem inconvenienced in working on my animals, etc. I don’t know. It’s all very discouraging when I know I could hack it and survive (even if out of sheer will and determination), but I just don’t feel like I would ever be selected.
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Canada dropped the preventative use of antibiotics in chickens years ago. Then, more recently, the big “factory farms” cut back on chickens per square foot as well as taking other preventive, antibiotic alternatives. Although it has required a change in how farmers do things, it has been overall successful, and will be even more successful once the stubborn “old school” chicken farmers die off. there is very little reason that a closed environment like a “factory” chicken farm, or “Factory” pig farm should need antibiotics on any large scale - much better to prevent than to treat.
I haven’t seen penicillin used in our horses for a very long time, but I know one old school vet still hands it out like candy to his clients. The paradigm needs to change, but people are resistant. Our vet is more likely to prescribe SMS, OR in the case of an existing infection, to actually test for what the infection is, and prescribe something that is going to be effective. I don’t know that we have been able to buy OTC antibiotics for some time (in Canada), and I know when they first pulled them from the shelves people were complaining that they needed them when their goat/chicken/cow got xyz… and then vets would chime in that those ailments were not treated by antibiotics…
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