I just assumed that the tests would be a written test, when my vet was telling me why he wanted to be licensed in several states he felt it was best to do it when he was fresh out of vet school rather than waiting several years and then having to take a test in another state if he decided to relocate. I remember that he took the tests for NY and FL, I don’t remember the third state. He has been retired for at least 17 years, was the licensing requirements different from when you took them?
I’m sure they are in some places.
They weren’t in MA at the time I first got licensed. (close to 40 years ago)
There was a practical component in NYS at one point, and it was widely known that the Cornell grads should wear their red coveralls to the large animal portion to let the examiners know where they were from.
These days there’s a lot of reciprocity–if you have an active license and a clean record in one state, it’s relatively straightforward to get licensed in another state.
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Funny in a bad way.
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My current small animal vets (there are 3 in the practice) all went to Cornell vet school, I will have to ask them about wearing red. Two of them are 72-73 so a bit older than you I think. The vet I was referring to who took the licensing test in three states went to vet school in Italy.
I don’t know if they do the same thing at other vet schools, but there is a hall at Cornell that has a picture of each graduating class.
It’s kind of fascinating to compare and contrast all the pictures. Particularly the ratio of men and women as the years go by.
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That’s interesting, when I was growing up there was no such thing as a female vet or a female doctor either! In my area we have lots of women vets now, both equine and small animal. If my vets have pictures of their graduation they are not on display in the office but I had another Cornell vet who had something on the wall in one of the examining rooms showing that he was first in his anatomy class. He is a lot younger than my current vets.
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When I was in HS, I worked for Norman Hall.
His son Pete went to Cornell.
I was interested in becoming a DVM, and was talking to Norman’s wife Kay one day.
This was before title IX, and Cornell had a policy of admitting 2 women per class, IIRC.
Didn’t matter how qualified they were compared to the men–there was a ridiculously small quota.
Kay was very supportive of my dreams, but told me that one of the muckamucks at Cornell at the time thought admitting any women was a waste of resources, because “they’ll just get married and have kids.”
One of Pete’s woman classmates got married, had twins, and still graduated near the top of the class.
Kay said that when she pointed that out at commencement and said that sort of blew his argument out of the water that the old fart harumphed and said, “If she hadn’t had kids, she could have been valedictorian” in a tone that indicated her achievement was some sort of failure.
Kay then looked at me, sighed, and said, “you just can’t change some people.”
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That sounds like somebody my mother might have encountered when she went to Cornell.
But she ignored him, and she is one of the first women in those class pictures hanging in the hallway of the vet school.
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I don’t care if he is the vet for the King of England, his treatment resulted in the death of Chromatic BF and that is a heartbreaking tragedy!
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Taking the thread further afield.
My mom was advised not to apply to med school circa 1950 because she “wouldn’t want to take a place away from a young man, possibly a veteran who had served in WWII.” The advisor suggested that she wait a few years and apply then if she still wanted to. Meanwhile, she became a hospital lab tech, met my dad when he brought a sample to the lab, and the rest is history. I suppose that one can argue both ways in her case–it worked out OK for her not going to med school, but we’ll never know what she could/would have done had she gone.
When I started grad school my class was half women, which roughly doubled the number of women grad students in the department. Someone had talked to someone who advised that isolated women would have less success than a cohort of women. I’m still in contact with a number of these women, even years later.
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And why aren’t heads rolling at USEF??
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Did your mother ever regret not pursuing a medical career? I feel so sorry for her. That attitude about taking jobs away from men was common in the 1960s when I was growing up. I remember there was a recession at one time and my mother saying she would be happy to give up her job if only she could be sure it would go to a man who is supporting a family. Since my father was able to support us my mother felt as though she was keeping someone else from caring for his family. 
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Yes and no. I think she was mostly satisfied with her life, but wondered what could have been. She was a voracious organizer of things–PTA, girl scouts, horse show management, city equestrian committee–but all as a volunteer.
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Following this brief tangent: also in the 50s my great aunt was working on her PhD. She applied to a prestigious position at university and was told she was qualified, but they couldn’t hire her since she’d be taking a job from a man with a family to support.
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I had a women’s studies class in the early 1980’s that was amazing.
We had a broad spectrum of ages in the group, and a number of the women who had been actively recruited into the workforce during WWII were told afterwards to go home–they were taking jobs away from veterans.
The striaght out of highschool students were utterly shocked.
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It seems as though she had a very fulfilling life but I guess everyone wonders how their life would have turned out if they had made other choices.
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True, this.
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Life is not a double-blind study.
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I was a wild teen. There was a moment when I made a random choice. My life could have turned out differently, that’s for sure. And not in a good way.
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