Title pretty much asks the question: Could a veterinarian successfully amputate a human limb?
I know nothing about surgery, but I can’t see much difference between animal amputation and human amputation.
Could he, safely and sterile-ly, in such circumstances as would today warrant an amputation medically? Certainly; he’s a trained quasi-medical professional. Could he legally? As usual, it depends on state law, but I suspect that under such extreme circumstances that warrant immediate amputation in the field (limb crushed under multi-ton object inside a burning building, for example), he would probably be covered by Good Samaritan laws – he would be the most nearly fully trained professional on the scene, yada yada. Would a DVM ever actually do it, absent the highly improbable hypothetical such as my example? I would say the chances are vanishingly small.
As far as training goes, the preference of course is always to save a limb if possible, to postpone amputation until the patient can be examined by MDs in an emergency room if possible, so the likelihood of a DVM but no MD being at the scene of a patient requiring immediate amputation is going to be extremely small. But a part of his training is to safely amputate mangled limbs from quadrupeds in at least two different orders of mammals, so he should have little difficulty adapting his knowledge to a human.
You never noticed the ax behind the door, did you?
I think just about anyone could successfully amputate a limb. You just keep hacking at it until it comes off, right?
There was that idiot hiker a while back who got pinned under a boulder and successfully amputated his own arm.
Heh. I think my sister the vet student would protest rather strongly to being called a “quasi-medical professional”- she likes to point out that humans generally all have the same anatomy (other than male/female of course) while cats and cows are rather different, and she has to be knowledgeable in pathology, pharmacology, anaesthesia, radiology and myriad other tasks usually done by nurses or assistants in the human medical world.
That being said, the thought of giving a needle to a human makes her pale and seeing a human bleed makes her faint. She can chop up animals in surgery and anatomy all day long, but feels woozy at her own paper cuts. I’m told many of her classmates are the same.
So regardless of training, oddly enough I think a lot of vets wouldn’t be able to perform an amputation on a human any better than anyone else, simply because they’d be too woozy to do it! 
My daughter is a vet and I’m sure she could amputate a limb.
I could amputate a limb. Tourniquet and sharp blade is all you need.
Well, what standard are you comparing the vet to? An ophthalmologist? A psychiatrist? An oncologist? A general surgeon? An orthopedist?
Also, what kind of vet? A veterinary surgeon, a veterinary radiologist, an animal behaviorist, or what?
“Need answer fast”
You’re probably better off with a vet doing it than a doctor. As they say “When grandma dies, everyone says ‘It was her time,’ but when they lose a pet or livestock, people get pissed.” :dubious:
“Successful” means more than just removing the limb. You also want the patient to remain alive and leave a stump that will heal properly and you can fix a prosthesis to later on. You may have to ligate the major blood vessels to prevent bleeding to death. You will also have to make sure the remaining bone does not project beyond the rest of the limb, and leave muscle and skin flaps that can be sewn over the bone.
I work near a university campus, and the Veterinary School students there seem to be rather fond of wearing tshirts/sweatshirts proclaiming that “Real Doctors Treat More Than One Species.”
Nah, real doctors make a substantive and original contribution to human knowledge. The medical bit is incidental to that.
In Japan, the hand can be used as a knife…
You also want to properly preserve the limb unless it’s going directly into the stew pot or roasting pan.:D:D
Why are you calling him an idiot? 
I read a joke a long time ago about a military base during an epidemic of some kind. Everyone who could handle a needle was called in to give shots (don’t know about the junkies, though). One solder who was vaccinated by the vet commented that “that didn’t feel a thing compared to when the doctor gives an injection”. “I have to”, the vet said, “my regular patients bite”.
Seriously! I call him “that guy who will never, ever have to buy his own drink in any bar in the world as long as he’ll live”.
And yet if he had amputated both arms, nobody would bother.