The president of the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association says there are enough large animal veterinarians practising in Western Canada to meet current needs.
Julie de Moissac, who has served as CVMA president since last June, said the livestock industry is being served well and, contrary to some suggestions, vet students in the West are eager to enter large animal practice.
Calgary’s new vet program will bring additional new practitioners into the industry, she added.
“I think Western Canada is not short of large animal practitioners,” said de Moissac. “If anything, it’s short of large animal producers.”
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She said retention, not recruitment, is the biggest challenge.
“There’s a lot of youth that are really interested in large animal practice,” she said.
However, many don’t stay long.
“They will stay for maybe three or four years and if they don’t receive proper mentorship in a practice or decent experience, then they’ll just move on to small animal practice.”
De Moissac praised the Saskatchewan Veterinary Medical Association mentorship program, funded by the provincial government and SVMA, because it allows first and second year students from the Western College of Veterinary Medicine to get hands-on experience with an established vet service.
Eligible students from Saskatchewan are paired with a mixed or large animal practice that is willing to provide mentorship.
De Moissac said the program has had impressive results and remains a key initiative aimed at ensuring rural areas are well served.
Changes to the western Canadian livestock industry over the past decade have also had a significant impact on large animal veterinary workloads, she said. In general, there are fewer livestock producers than there were 10 years ago and those that remain are larger operators who have adopted new calving and feeding strategies that minimize health problems.
De Moissac, who has operated her own mixed practice near Outlook, Sask., since 1991, said the workload has changed.
“It’s not as much of an emergency based workload as it is a production based workload.
“For example, I used to do loads of calving (calls) and caesarians in the spring and now that’s dropped off considerably. Now, I do far more bull evaluations.”
She said later breeding and calving have reduced disease problems. Many producers are calving in April and May, allowing calves to be born on grass rather than in a crowded corral.
A move by commercial beef producers away from exotic breeds has also had a huge impact on the rural vets’ workloads.
“There used to be a lot of exotic breeds … that give bigger, heavier calves so there was more calving difficulty.”
Now, commercial producers are moving to breeds like black and red Angus, which give smaller calves but are less likely to need veterinary care during calving, she said.
