The Road to Rural Veterinary Medicine with Richard Prather

So talk to me a little bit.

We've begun to cover, you know, the importance of large animal veterinarians and the relationships that they have with their clients and rural producers.

But how important are those veterinarians in your eyes, particularly large animal veterinarians to rural America and farming and ranching?

We have the ability because of our relationship with the producers that we work with, whether it be a commercial operator or a seed stock operator, we have the skills and we have the background from what we learned in our agricultural degrees, what we learned in our veterinary degree that will help with the well-being.

and the profitability of their cattle operations, whether it be caring for the reproduction, the nutrition, the animal health programs in that aspect of their life to the point of caring for their horses that they gather their cattle with on working days, whether it be branding or weaning or just daily checks to areas that even...

Their lives after work when they're sitting around in the evening trying to relax, watch the weather forecast with that working dog or their pet sitting on their lap.

Our influence touches numerous points in their life.

And it's just great to have those open doors and those relationships that let us in.

And I kind of want to break this next part down into two sections.

But what do you think is the biggest barrier to young people considering veterinary medicine?

Probably just understanding and getting the word out that there's so much more than just someone who vaccinates or cares for their animal when it's having trouble delivering.

The veterinary profession is so vast.

Most people don't understand that Veterinarians are highly involved in their food safety and being able to have and live in a country where we have the safest, most wholesome, most enjoyable food product anywhere in the world.

That's all touched by a veterinarian somewhere along the way.

The safety of those products, the wholesomeness, the confidence that we have in our food supply to people.

education to people back into that profession and to be able to support the research that goes on.

Research from veterinary medicine is touching lives through metabolic diseases like diabetes, through aging disorders such as dementia.

The careers in veterinary medicine are just so vast and helping young people understand or even experience the opportunities that a veterinary curriculum could get to them.

That's probably the biggest barrier.

The second part of that question is, what do you think is the biggest barrier to those young people being successful in pursuing their veterinary career? A

lot of them are understanding how they need to prepare.

It's not an easy curriculum.

It's a competitive curriculum.

So helping young people understand early on that it's going to require discipline.

It's going to require them to have done a fair amount of preparation through their junior high and high school years in the math and the sciences and be able to problem solve rather than just sheer memorize in their curriculum.