Farm vets?

[AvonValleyFarmer]

My late uncle was a vet and iirc said there was only 4 girls out of 90 at vet college during his time which was during the late sixties.Today I would say the overwhelming majority at vet college would be girls and this is where the problem lies.Girls have babies ,struggle physically with some of the large animal work and ,perhaps, don't quite hack working in all weather and conditions as much as the boys and so tend to leave the industry early.
I think there should be a concerted effort to attract more boys to vet college to help reduce the shortages.
By the way this is not intended to be a criticism of lady vets just an observation.

The maternity thing I'll give you, but I wouldn't agree about the fairer sex struggling to do the physical jobs. All of my Vets are ladies, I'm yet to see any job they can't do.

 

[rusco]

The female vets in our local practice are able to do the job as well if not better than their male counterparts especially when it comes to sheep work.

 

[Devil's advocate]

So what can we do? Can see it getting much worse as we go on, will it get to a stage where you can’t get a vet to come out?

I think we need to be bringing this up at political level before it becomes an animal welfare issue.

My friend was considering setting up a group between some of the large farms in his area and employing a vet between them. Would mean a fixed amount per head of livestock to get the person their salary, they would be flat out at calving time but have plenty time off the rest of the year, I can’t see how it would work though as you would always need vet cover all year round so the vet is going to be tied to a sober life at the end of a phone night and day.

I've a neighbour with 400 suckler cows & 6,000 breeding ewes, some gossip says more, some less.

He does struggle to keep staff. I've often thought his own vet would be a good investment. Doing assurance work, health plans, training younger staff & making his time up with stock tasks. Would give the farm a real lift, I would have thought.

In such a situation, would the vet be able to prescribe controlled drugs? I know it is an issue if a vet is a family member,

I know it dosen't seem like it when paying the bill, but vets are very under payed.

 

[Farmer Fin]

I've a neighbour with 400 suckler cows & 6,000 breeding ewes, some gossip says more, some less.

He does struggle to keep staff. I've often thought his own vet would be a good investment. Doing assurance work, health plans, training younger staff & making his time up with stock tasks. Would give the farm a real lift, I would have thought.

In such a situation, would the vet be able to prescribe controlled drugs? I know it is an issue if a vet is a family member,

I know it dosen't seem like it when paying the bill, but vets are very under payed.

Wouldn’t be much demand for controlled drugs. Vet would probably still be self employed in that instance. 400 cows at £50 vet and med cost, would be much in it to pay a vet salary after payed for the drugs!

 

[Whitepeak]

Mostly men do the large animal vet work in our practice, they did have a very good lady vet but she was nearly always pregnant at lambing time she's still with the practice but mainly on the small animal side now.


A lad I know from Northern Ireland, who was a dairy farmers son, has recently qualified but has moved to Canada to work as a large animal vet. And a local farmers daughter and good large animal vet, now works for a pharmaceutical company and only does emergency cover vet work now. So there are good large animal graduates out there, it's just keeping them.

 

[ollie989898]

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, today, I wish I had done agricultural and large animal veterinary studies rather than accountancy and IT.

Go and do it. Never too late.

 

[ollie989898]

My wife is a large animal vet. Several other female assistants at the practice. As you know I worked in roughly the same area, speaking to the exact same clients, and in the whole time I was agronomizing, and in all the conversations I had; I never heard a single complaint or negative remark about any of the female assistants at the practice from a farmer, only compliments. Even the most die-hard misogynist and non-PC streak in me was not expecting that.

Female vets I am convinced are actually better for the large animal role. Number 1 reason- lack of ego. I think males, and I am as guilty as the rest, have this inbuilt competition thing: look at me, I am well clever, let me show you, are you impressed yet? type thing going on in the hindbrain. It means that very very skilled or experienced males can tend to talk down to others, particularly in a field as technical as the veterinary world. I learned fast, believe me: you could be the best agronomist/vet/nutritionist/tractor driver in the world but unless you can communicate with farmers they will literally bury you- it is their train set and whilst they might be paying the bill they do not have to accept your eggs, emulate the way you choose to suck and cook em nor do they have to eat em. Most of them have been doing the job far longer than you and most of them have arms like hams.Women just don't seem to have that in their psyche, they don't boast, they don't tell I have watched how my wife would interact with a client and contrasted it to how I would do the same. The difference was quite striking.

I've met a lot of veterinary students on farms as well, the vast majority of them all being quite slender and delicate looking things. You know the scene; little blonde female arrives for a difficult calving, how the heck is this gonna pan out, if a big rufty-tufty farmer can't get it out, how will she manage? Sure enough, in goes the much more modest female arm and in what seems no time at all, out pops a calf. It's all technique- and vets are only ever called to convoluted or difficult calvings and so they get good at it by default, strength is apparently largely unnecessary and farms normally have an ample supply of bicep around anyway, although my wife is very much the sort of bird who would appear on: SAS- are you tough enough? and walk it.

As for the whole veterinary job, I am not sure the numbers of people trying to enter the career are the same, certainly the medical world is seeing a decrease in the numbers applying, I was told that this was because the old school wealthy families have spurned the old healthcare/dentistry careers for their offspring now; apparently the career to be seen in is finance/commerce in London all champagne and cocaine and who can blame them?

 

[scottish-lleyn]

Full disclosure: I am a vet that started out in mixed but mainly large animal practice. I'd had enough after a year and a half due to the isolation, lack of support, long hours, on call rota and poor pay. This is admittedly nearly 20 years ago and things in the profession have improved for recent grads. It would also have to be said that some (minority) of the farmers weren't the most pleasant to deal with. I now do meat hygiene work.

Edit: Another reason I packed it in was a bad back. It's a physical job.

I went to a conference last February, the topic for which was 'Brexit and the veterinary profession'. Several speakers touched on the lack of vets in the country and how Brexit would make this worse and what a major problem this was. This was echoed in several articles in the Vet Record etc. this year. When the veterinary pay survey was published later in the year, pay levels had actually gone down! What happened to supply and demand??

I don't think that it should be any surprise that a profession where recent graduate numbers have been so dominated by females should be struggling for practicing vets, particularly not in a branch where out-of-hours cover and a fair degree of physical strength are required. That's not to say that there are not many excellent female farm vets (there's one in our local practice).

which vets do you use if you dont mind telling me.?

 

[kill]

My current vets have changed names a few times but it's the same business as both my set of grandparents and my parents used throughout their farming activities but they didn't sub contract for TB testing and now seam to be an all time low on farm vets and sold out to a massive company.
My concerns now are they just haven't got the staff to cover large animals unlike a far larger independent firm that currently just dos my TB testing but have alot of vets over 3 sites which I think would maybes be a better option.

 

[manhill]

When they turn up in all sorts of weathers and working conditions, treat my animals and explain and advise, they're heroes in my view.

 

[Cowgirl]

Agree it is a rather sad situation when good large animal practices cannot fill jobs. I qualified in 1974 and I was one of 10 females out of 60. I have worked with all species, including 5 years with pigs) but ended up in academia and referral small animal work. Almost all of the women in my year are either still working or have only recently retired.
My daughter is in first year at vet school with 16 males out of 120. Several of the men are very keen to do large animal work, she says, but mainly the girls are not interested in farm work. What is more surprising to me is that not all that many are interested in horse work either, so most will end up in small animal practices working for corporates. I agree with what has been said that the academic requirements are extremely high (and girls do better in exams) and pay is poor compared with medicine or dentistry. You can blame the people selecting students, but I was on the student selection panel for the RVC for 10 years and it was very difficult - often the girls performed better at interview too, so without sex discrimination you could not keep them out. Having said that our local practice is entirely female, all farmers’ daughters and they are all excellent, very fit and tough as nails. We do need more men in the profession though. I would support the idea of an agricultural technician qualification but I can’t see the veterinary powers that be agreeing to it.

 

[Andrew1983]

Just to clarify I never started the post to question the abilities of female vets, as others have said I have seen them work every bit as well and better than male vets.

My tread was the lack of vets in general for farm work and I believe that the majority of females qualifying as vets dont want to do farm work, the same possibly applies to men too its just that theres a small fraction of men actually qualifying as vets. My wife’s practice would take any vet thats keen to do large animal work, they just arent there!


So how do we change things to insure we have a supply of vets going forward? I suggested she try’s recruiting from overseas, she asked would I be hppy with a foreign vet coming on farm, of course I said, look at the NHS!

 

[pipeman1964]

My son is at Guilford Uni studying to become a vet , i know he is only in his first year but he told me he want to large farm animals as he finds them more interesting than small animals and equine but he has a long way to go yet and hopefully he will make the grade.

 

[Woolless]

which vets do you use if you dont mind telling me.?

Galedin vets in Berwick, although they are very rare visitors for obvious reasons. My dog has been something of a dripping roast for them, however

 

[Woolless]

Agree it is a rather sad situation when good large animal practices cannot fill jobs. I qualified in 1974 and I was one of 10 females out of 60. I have worked with all species, including 5 years with pigs) but ended up in academia and referral small animal work. Almost all of the women in my year are either still working or have only recently retired.
My daughter is in first year at vet school with 16 males out of 120. Several of the men are very keen to do large animal work, she says, but mainly the girls are not interested in farm work. What is more surprising to me is that not all that many are interested in horse work either, so most will end up in small animal practices working for corporates. I agree with what has been said that the academic requirements are extremely high (and girls do better in exams) and pay is poor compared with medicine or dentistry. You can blame the people selecting students, but I was on the student selection panel for the RVC for 10 years and it was very difficult - often the girls performed better at interview too, so without sex discrimination you could not keep them out. Having said that our local practice is entirely female, all farmers’ daughters and they are all excellent, very fit and tough as nails. We do need more men in the profession though. I would support the idea of an agricultural technician qualification but I can’t see the veterinary powers that be agreeing to it.

Good point made there. There are plenty of female vets that would be/are capable of doing farm work at a high level but many more that just wouldn't fancy it or for whom it just wouldn't work due to family commitments etc.

Funnily enough, when I was seeing vet students regularly about 10 years ago, they all wanted to be horse vets which I suppose reflected the background that they were coming from.

 

[Cowgirl]

Good point made there. There are plenty of female vets that would be/are capable of doing farm work at a high level but many more that just wouldn't fancy it or for whom it just wouldn't work due to family commitments etc.

Funnily enough, when I was seeing vet students regularly about 10 years ago, they all wanted to be horse vets which I suppose reflected the background that they were coming from.

Yes you can't make people do what they are not interested in doing! The difference when I was young is that many vet students came from a farming background - don't think there are that many now.
Also the thing I didn't mention above is that we are not training anything like the number of UK vets that people on here may think we are. When my daughter was applying I know that out of 120 students per year (at Edinburgh and Glasgow anyway) there were only 30 funded places for Scottish AND EU students, English students will be paying £9000 /' year tuition fees and a large proportion were full fee paying students from N America and Asia, who will inevitably go home when they are qualified, rather than staying here. This is how the universities make their money to put up new buildings etc. If you want a quick answer to the OP's question, double the salaries for farm practice assistants! (And that isn't going to happen....)

 

[ollie989898]

The above puts the whole issue in perspective. You do a degree for 5 years to qualify as a vet, costing 45K and that is before you have found a room to rent or fed yourself. You leave uni and what can farm vets expect to earn in their first 5 years?

It is the same issue for nurses. 3 years of training costing 27K and now look at the the contracts for newly qualified nurses? Not surprisingly, they do a few years and go and work in care homes and botox clinics for £20/hour. I know what I would do, too.

 

[Devil's advocate]

Wouldn’t be much demand for controlled drugs. Vet would probably still be self employed in that instance. 400 cows at £50 vet and med cost, would be much in it to pay a vet salary after payed for the drugs!

There is the 7,000 ewes too.

I was thinking that if all paperwork was spot on, staff kept well trained. All vaccinations planned & kept up to date with. Extra person at lambing/calving time.

It would seem cheap. There is (may be was) lots of Spanish, Polish, Italian vets etc. available at not much more than a herd manager.

Very wealthy man (self made) so I'm sure he is on a discount rate at his local vet's.

I can see a downside that it might be hard to recruit such a vet because he/she would perhaps not get the experience/guidance of working at a practice.

 

[JP1]

My son is at Guilford Uni studying to become a vet , i know he is only in his first year but he told me he want to large farm animals as he finds them more interesting than small animals and equine but he has a long way to go yet and hopefully he will make the grade.

Not to hijack the thread but how does he like Surrey? My Niece has offers from RVC, Liverpool and Surrey would be her local Uni

 

[Woolless]

Not to hijack the thread but how does he like Surrey? My Niece has offers from RVC, Liverpool and Surrey would be her local Uni

Who wants to spend five years listening to scousers? So it's a straight choice between RVC and Surrey!