Delisle, Sask.- Lori Fraser packs boxes in her living room. Tomorrow a cattle hauler will load her livestock. A moving van will cart away her family’s belongings.
When Fraser leaves, another rural community will lose its veterinarian. Another small-town practice will be left empty.
Fraser’s situation is typical among young veterinarians in Western Canada. She wants to practise large animal medicine in a small rural community, but is facing too many obstacles.
Forced to choose between a one-person, rural veterinary practice and collecting a salary from a larger, centralized vet service, Fraser chose the
Read Also
Agriculture ministers agree to AgriStability changes
federal government proposed several months ago to increase the compensation rate from 80 to 90 per cent and double the maximum payment from $3 million to $6 million
latter and moved to Wetaskiwin, Alta.
“It isn’t just about the money,” she said.
“If you have a family and want to have a life as well, then single vet practices (in rural communities) may not be the right path.
Some things would have to change.”
Fraser graduated from the Western College of Veterinary Medicine in Saskatoon in 1999 but her career path was anything but smooth.
She had a difficult childhood and dropped out of high school after completing Grade 9.
She returned to classes later, finished high school and enrolled in veterinary medicine at the University of Saskatchewan.
During her university years, she got married, had a baby, left her spouse, raised her child as a single parent and survived a life- threatening illness.
Fraser began her rural practice “on a credit card” after she found the chartered banks weren’t interested in lending money to a new graduate with “50 grand in student loans.”
Despite being underfunded, Fraser went ahead with her plans and depended on support from her new husband’s full-time job.
Before long, she built a 600 client practice in Delisle, about 30 kilometres west of Saskatoon.
“There was a void (in Delisle) and I filled it,” she said.
“But even when I was successful it was never enough. And the whole time I had to compete with city veterinarians for the pet business of the same farmers whose cattle I was treating.”
If small communities hope to attract and retain professional veterinarians, the role of the rural vet must change, Fraser said.
Livestock producers must make choices about the way they raise their cattle and communities need to consider how veterinarians are being treated, she said.
“This isn’t sour grapes. I had the best clients. But even the best needed to understand what it is going to take to keep a large animal veterinarian in their communities.”
Mixed animal practices rely on the small animal portion of their businesses to put bread on the table, said Fraser.
In one breath, livestock producers would tell Fraser how grateful they were to have a large animal specialist in their community.
In the next breath, they would tell her about the deal they got having a dog or cat vaccinated against rabies by an urban veterinarian who had set up a one day clinic in the vicinity.
“That money pays for office help and, if there is enough, for a technician to assist the vet,” she said. “That is what makes it possible for rural vets to see more animals, take time to keep current with new technology. Instead we spend our time mopping the surgery, inventorying the drug cabinet and sending out the invoices.”
Small animal treatment fees aren’t the only revenue eluding rural practitioners. Farmers and ranchers are also overlooking vets when it comes
to pregnancy checking their cattle.
It is illegal to perform pregnancy testing unless the tests are conducted by a licensed vet. Nonetheless, many farmers use unlicensed, non-professionals for pregnancy tests.
“Not only are they not all trained to do it properly, this too is part of the income for the local vet,” Fraser said.
“Preg testing is a large part of the fall work and if you want to have a vet around in the spring or when you get a wreck, then you need to make sure you give them all the work that is available. It is bad enough when we undercut each other, but when we have to compete with guys that haven’t paid to go to school and have no overhead of a clinic, well, that’s not good.”
Fraser said many livestock producers are reluctant to call the veterinarian until they need someone to “come out and fix their cattle when they’re broke.
“The cattle business is changing and overall herd health is the direction of the industry, but farmers have a hard time accepting veterinarians as paid consultants,” she said.
“They don’t want to pay for advice. They seem to figure that they should only pay for physically fixing their problems rather than avoiding them in the first place.”
If more livestock producers concentrated on maintaining herd health, then emergency calls would decrease, incomes would stabilize and the way of life would improve for the producer and
the vet, Fraser said.
“Working 20 hours a day for four months in the spring and three months in the fall is no way to make a life for a family.”
“At my new job I’ll be on call once every three days and work every third weekend … and get paid as a professional.
“We want to come back some day. I love this community, the farmers, my friends. But somehow there has to be a better way to do this work,” she said.
