[unclebilly]

As farmers, we get off at the vets a bit easier than city folk...

The vet we deal with does large animals and small animals but we get billed the same no matter who they are working on. We have a great relationship with all 4 vets at the clinic, I’ve been there in the middle of the night a few times with sick calves, they’ve been to our place countless times. When they come out, we try to get them to check out our cat and dog too if needed while they are here.

They are all super practical there and fully understand that every dollar we pay them is a dollar less we will make on a given animal. We have a cabinet full of medicines for cattle, some are ok for other animals too. I’ve given thousands of injections, my wife is a pro at stuffing a hose down into a calf’s stomach to relieve bloat, we’ve treated acidosis with glycol-p drenches, it’s what we do.

City vets can be extortionists. Our old vet in the city, saw my Porsche and tried getting us to cough up $4500 to determine what type of heart murmur our old dog had. Based on the diagnosis, we would treat with 1 of 2 types of meds. I told her that my approach would be to start with one med (the cheaper one) and if that didn’t clear it up, we would switch meds. In the end we switched vets and the new vet was not able to detect a heart murmur. That dog lived to 17.