I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I love veterinary medicine precisely because it’s so variable. Not only do the diseases, diagnostics, and treatments vary according to the species, but the medicine we vets practice also depends on how the animal fits into their human’s life. In other words, the value of the human-animal relationship has a direct influence on how we treat the animal.
For example, a pig farmer values his animals because they are a source of income. How do vets help increase his profit? We make sure his animals are healthy and happy, so that it takes less time and less food before each pig becomes fat enough to be sent to market. Pigs that are sick, constantly cold, or itchy don’t grow as well, so they cost the farmer more money in terms of feed. Vets pay a lot of attention to housing, waste management, nutrition, and herd health monitoring (among many other factors). Our lecturer on swine medicine, herself one of the approximately 100 swine vets in the US, emphasized how important it was to send tissue, saliva, or fecal samples to the lab every time there was a disease outbreak. It made the diagnosis so much easier!
But the human-animal relationship is different with a client who owns a small flock of sheep. While the owner values the money made selling the mutton or wool, it doesn’t constitute a major source of income. The owner also values the companionship of the sheep, and enjoys the husbandry chores that goes into raising lambs and ewes. So in this case, the small farmer often doesn’t have the resources for expensive lab work, yet their emotional connection often warrants diagnostics and treatment for the individual sick animal (whereas larger farms concentrate on improving overall health of the herd rather than nursing individuals back to health).