Kickass and Big Animal Vets by Bill Stokes

Attribution: USDAgov, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

By Bill Stokes

Kickass, the doorstop dog, rarely needs to see a veterinarian but is interested in the keeper’s news that the UW Vet School is working on a program to ease the looming big-animal veterinarian shortage across the rural environs.

With the inflated economics of the vet school meaning that graduates are burdened with an average student debt of $139,000, and the fact that most of them head for the urban pet clinics instead of the barns, there are fewer replacements for the old retiring rural veterinarians, like Doc C, the long-ago Barron area vet who once accidentally stuck a needle in the keeper’s teenage arm, thus inoculating him from the disease that caused cows to abort their fetuses. A swollen arm and an angry mother were the only results. No aborted fetuses, of course.

Deciding to be a big animal doc is an obvious commitment and means a life of bad rural roads, late night calls and working in the proximity of manure and erratic large-patient behavior. When the alternative is to pet puppies and cats in a lounge setting the issue takes a sharp focus.

The keeper and Phyllis raise a cheer for the young rural animal docs in training. They are among us and offer examples of compassion and decency in this age of narcissistic fools.