Monday, September 3, 2001
Vet's job changes with times
By Dr. Sara Core, 47, veterinarian and
owner of Ridgemont Animal Clinic, as told to Samuel Segrist.
When I was first in practice in 1979, the
cases I treated were fairly routine things. Now they reflect the
fact that pets have gone from being "my pet dog or cat"
to being "part of my family." It's kind of a mindset.
People aren't willing for you to say, "Well, your dog has
cancer. That's it." They want me to say what can be done
for them. They want to do everything they can. And that was not
necessarily the way it was 20 years ago.
The pets have gone from being out in the yard, and, "Yes,
we take him for a walk," and, "Yes, we pet him,"
to "He's my child, he's part of my family, and he lives with
us in the house."
I didn't have exceptionally high numbers of animals growing up.
I just enjoyed the ones that I did have. The way I look at it
is, "Where else can I go to work all day and hang out with
dogs and cats and get paid for it?"
I enjoy science and medicine and I enjoy animals. So that was
a good marriage of the two.
What keeps the job interesting over time is to develop areas of
interest. Veterinary medicine - just like human medicine - has
gotten so high-tech. There's such a huge amount of information
that you can't be everything to everybody.
There are still those veterinarians who work on large animals
and small animals - anything that comes in the door, in other
words. But I feel more comfortable limiting my practice to small
animals, because there is so much information. This way I can
be really good at what I do instead of semi-good at a bunch of
stuff.
Katy's a golden retriever who has been coming here a long time.
When she gets here, she'll grab her leash from the car, come in
and sit on the scale and then go right into the examination room.
I deal mainly with dogs and cats. Occasionally we'll have a bird
come in. Occasionally we'll have rabbits and those kinds of things.
Reptiles are actually pretty easy to work on. Being cold-blooded
animals, you don't have to sedate them much, you just put them
in the fridge for a while, and they go dormant and then you can
do what you need to do with them because they're sleeping.
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©2001, Abilene Reporter-News / Texnews / E.W. Scripps.
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