It seems there is a real lack of vet schools in the US. For example there are far more medical schools around. Now I know there are millions of pets, and as they say, more are created each day.
In California, as just an example, there is only one vet school that I know of in the entier state (University of California at Davis), and as I understand it there are many more applicants (no cite) than there are spots at the beginning of each term. And the surrounding states each only have one vet school of their own.
So what’s the deal? Why keep the number of veterinarians artifically low by having so few schools? Could I open a school if I wanted to?
If you think the number of veterinarians is artificially low, I would like to see some figures to back that up. In most cities, access to veterinary care is a lot easier than medical care for humans.
Veterinarians can examine a lot of animals in one day, especially if they are large animal vets. Human beings just don’t form themselves into herds very well.
If you look at the list of accredited vet schools in the U.S., you’ll immediately notice that only one (Tufts) is part of a private university. The rest are all in state-supported colleges.
If there were really an effort to keep the number of vet schools “artificially low” don’t you think some aggressive private university would have opened one and soaked up all those excess students? Or there would be a whole bunch of Carribean veterinary schools?
In truth, it’s about as hard to start a veterinary school from scratch as it is a medical school.
Vet schools require some serious facilities - in addition to all of the things that a human medical school needs (anatomy labs, attachment to a working hospital, specialists to teach…etc) for small animals (dogs & cats) they need the same things for large animals (horses, cows, sheep, goats). Then you need the experts to teach poultry and exotics.
UPenn has a great facility for large animal care - the New Bolton center - it’s outside Philly in the countryside and has some cool features - the equuine intensive care unit, and all of the water pools for horse post op recovery are cool, especially when you look up at the ~30 ft high ceiling and see the tracks up there, used to move horses with damaged legs around.
It seems it would be too expensive for most owners until you realize that they get plenty of million dollar racehorses in there.
Ross (Grenada, I think?) and St. George are the two veterinary schools in the Caribbean, both accredited by AVMCA (Lesser Antilles, of course… Cuba and Dominican Republic have their own schools).
It’s not on the list at the first page BobT cites, but on this list, there’s a vet school at Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona CA. I’m fairly sure that’s a private school.
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