06/10/2026
**A Week Later, I'm More Hopeful Than I Was**
Last week I posted "Nobody's Coming," about what happens when the last large-animal vet near you quits. 490 comments later, I'm more hopeful than I was, and I'll tell you why.
I spent a good bit of this week reading what you had to say. Veterinarians, farmers, horse owners, vet students, retired practitioners, and plenty of folks who've lived in rural communities long enough to know what it means when the vet truck quits coming. There was frustration in those comments and some sadness too, but there were also a whole lot of people trying to figure out how to make this better.
The easiest thing to do would be to pick somebody to blame, and it would probably be the least useful. You can blame vet schools for what education costs or for not admitting enough kids who grew up around livestock. You can blame government for regulations and student debt. You can blame clients who want somebody available at two in the morning but grumble about the emergency fee, practices that won't share call, the corporations, or young vets for wanting weekends with their families. There were versions of every one of those arguments in the comments, and I don't think any one of them explains it. What I heard instead was a profession and a rural community that have changed around each other until the old model quit fitting.
There are still young people who want this work. There are still students who love cattle and horses, and vets who'd rather spend an afternoon driving farm roads than standing in an exam room. Several people who had left large-animal practice said they still loved the work. They just couldn't make the rest of the life add up. You can love pulling a calf at midnight and still want to see your own kids on Saturday morning. You can believe deeply in rural veterinary medicine and still have a mortgage, student loans, and a family that would occasionally like to know where you are.
Love of the work matters, but eventually the math gets a vote.
Vet schools have work to do, and I say that as somebody who has spent much of his career in veterinary education. One commenter put it about as plain as it gets: a down heifer doesn't care if you wore the right suit to your interview. We ought to be asking whether we're finding young people who understand agriculture and rural life and giving them a reasonable path in. That means looking hard at the cost of school, scholarships, the expense of externships, and whether students ever see the practices that have actually made rural medicine work. And we ought to follow the story past graduation. It's one thing to celebrate a new grad taking a rural job. I want to know whether that vet is still there five years later. If somebody stayed twenty years and somebody else lasted two, there's something to learn from both of them.
But vet colleges aren't going to fix this from inside our buildings, and clients have a piece of it too. Vets in the comments made one thing clear: a practice can't live on emergencies alone. If all the routine work gets done at home, the products get bought somewhere else, and the vet only gets called when the cow has been trying to calve since breakfast, it gets awfully hard to keep the people, truck, and equipment it takes to have somebody available when the phone rings after midnight. That doesn't mean farmers should quit doing what they know how to do. Rural people were taking care of animals long before any of us hung a DVM after our name. And folks who can't buy basic meds without a vet, then can't find a vet, have a fair gripe. It just means having a vet in the community has a cost, even on the days nobody needs one.
Most of you already know this, and it showed. But some of it is simple. Pay the vet fairly and pay on time. Have the animal caught before the truck pulls in, and give them a safe place to work. And understand that if somebody leaves a warm bed, drives forty miles through January weather, and crawls behind your cow at two in the morning, the emergency fee isn't what's making that vet rich. It may be what keeps them answering the phone next winter.
Vets and practices have a piece of it too. The old model, where one person carried the phone for half a county and everybody called that being a real country vet, made for some wonderful stories and wore out a lot of wonderful veterinarians. Commenters talked about shared call, neighboring practices cooperating, and better use of veterinary technicians. We ought to be willing to rethink it. There's no medal at retirement for missing the most Christmas mornings.
Legislators belong in this conversation as well. If veterinary access matters to agriculture, animal welfare, and food production, there's a public interest in keeping it going. Loan repayment, the cost of school, and access to medications all came up. Those conversations deserve more than another committee report telling us there's a shortage.
And rural communities may have the biggest opportunity of all: grow your own. There are kids in FFA meetings and standing beside 4-H animals right now who already understand livestock, cold mornings, muddy boots, and the fact that cows have never once checked the office hours before getting into trouble. Some of them would make terrific veterinarians. They need encouragement, mentors, sometimes money, and somebody to tell them vet school is a place they belong. One Amish community in the comments didn't wait on anybody. They banded together and sent two of their young men to vet school. Then, when those kids come home, the community has to give them a reason to stay.
After a week of reading, I don't think rural veterinary medicine is short on people who care. Everybody in those comments cared. A lot of you took the time to name your vet and thank them, and that was my favorite part of the whole week. We've just spent too long expecting one group to fix the whole thing, and no one group can. It's going to take schools, practices, clients, legislators, and communities each carrying their end.
Last week I said nobody's coming. A week and a whole lot of comments later, I'd finish it differently. There can still be somebody on the other end of that phone at two in the morning.
But keeping them there is going to take all of us.
