I've often wondered why vet schools haven't split degrees certain areas such as large animal or companion animal or exotics.

It's amazing how many species vet students have to learn. It must be overwhelming! Plus, what's the point of learning bovine c-sections if one plans to go into a dog/cat practice? It makes sense that a large animal vet might need to know about dogs and cats for a farm visit, but would that farmer prefer someone who had more large animal classes or someone who had to learn all species?

Just a thought.

I went to vet school to be a horse vet. I did that for a year before I decided that it was not for me, for a variety of reasons. I now see dog and cats, and along the way I picked up an interest in exotic pets. So now I see birds, reptiles and small mammals. I am a member of AAV and AEMV, and my membership to ARAV is pending.

If, while I was in vet school, that someday I would be regularly drawing blood from budgies, I would have laughed long and loud. I still chuckle to myself about it.

Many people that I know who are interested in these animals did not start out this way. They developed an interest later. This includes some board certified specialists for these pets!

It is also very difficult to maintain a practice only seeing exotic pets. Those practices do exist, but they are rare, and are more likely in urban areas that can support a population so the practice/business is sustainable. People assume that because they are small, and inexpensive to purchase, that they are then inexpensive to diagnose and treat. Its more difficult to get samples from very small animals, so I need to be much more skilled to get them, or I need to pay a person with highly developed skills to do it for me. The lab doesn't charge me a lower price to run the tests I need. A radiograph costs the same for a ferret as for a labrador. I often have to get drugs compounded for small animals because I can't get it in a dose size that makes sense--there are only so many times you can split a pill! Often, these pets do not get the same level of care because their owners are unwilling to spend the same amount on them as on their dog. This is not universally true, and there are cases where I end up discounting a service because I would like the owner to pursue it. I recently removed a large lump off a guinea pig. Because of the size of the animal and the size of the lump, this was a very difficult surgery, yet we lost money on it because the owner was not willing to spend money on the pet. We would have made more money (and at least covered costs!) with this same lump on a large dog, and it would have been easier, too!

So, we are back to the same old problem about vets being "too expensive" but its even more so when you own a $10 pet that is seen as disposable by many--but happily not all--people. Its even worse when you are dealing with a reptile that was won as a carnival game prize (yes) and has had months or years of poor care, and its owner is unwilling to consider that they are doing a bad job of caring for their animal.

It would be a wonderful world where we all knew exactly what we would be doing 10 years after graduation, and could then decide to track our education. It would be wonderful if veterinary education were subsidized so that we did not have to go so far into debt to just get the basics down, never mind consider an internship/residency that pays poverty wages (if it pays at all!) to learn everything about all the species we might encounter. But that's not the real world. :)

I remember spending $75 to take a one dollar feeder mouse that my son "rescued" from the pet store because it had mites. The way I saw it, from the time he came into my home he was family and deserved to be treated the same as the other pets. He was also the one that I almost drowned when I gave him his antibiotics and I sat and rocked him for an hour until I knew he would be okay (yes, I held and rocked a mouse - go ahead and laugh!) He lost most of his ears to the mites before we got them under control, but he lived to be 3 and was a lot of fun while we had him :)