Feb 3 2011

Things got tense tonight between Dr Schur and Lamb. The old guy has a different philosophy than the younger lady. Things have been slow and the practice is not making enough money to break even so they are trying to find out ways to be busier and make more money. Garth wants to offer discounts on some procedures like vaccinations and other routine care. Dr Schur is very opposed to offering discounts and has actually raised prices of things a few months ago. She is a big believer in charging and in my opinion charging too much. In her defense Vets do not get paid well. We all went to school for so long and payed a lot in student loans and we really don’t get paid any better than a plumber who makes house calls. I do agree with Garth though because I would rather be charging a little less and work a little more to stay busy vs working less and charging more. I think there is a component of providing the best care for our patients we can and part of that is being affordable so the clients don’t neglect their horses. It shouldn’t be our responsibility, it should be the owners to make a judgment if they can afford to properly take care of a horse and if not then not have a horse in the first place. Mike Rowe summed it up well in a talk I attended at the Western Veterinary conference last week. They invited him to talk because of his show on the discovery channel called Dirty Jobs. He has done a lot of shows with animals and quite frankly being a veterinarian is just about the dirtiest job in the world. He was funny and for every letter of the alphabet he thought of an animal and a story or experience while shooting his show about that animal. It was quite James Herriott-esk. Something he said that I thought was true is when he compared Vets to human MDs and then other blue collar careers. He said that Vets are one of the few jobs that is in between blue and white collar. You do hard work like a blue collar but you are most valuable because of your knowledge and ability to communicate. It has some of the best of both worlds in his opinion and I agree with him. Just like being between blue and white collar I think we should charge as such.

June 3, 2011

This morning started like many others I slept up to the very last moment I could I was up late treating a colic in Henderson till midnight and then getting up at 4 to treat a horse in the hospital returning to sleep between 5 and 7:45 am when I rolled back out of bed took a shower threw Sally a flake of hay and drove down Jones Blvd to the hospital. Just as I was rolling up on the hospital I could see a little black guy crossing the busy street leading a scraggily grey arab causing traffic to back up as they looked puzzled and irritated. I thought it was strange that this little guy was dressed like a homeless man in baggy sweatpants typically not the type of person you would think would be leading a horse around town. Hanging out around a casino or down on the strip but not up in our part of town with a horse. I then heard some of the techs talking about the strange homeless man that Garth had to ask to leave cause he had tied his horse to the flagpole and was asking a bunch of weird questions. He was asking the girls up front in the office about farriers and various questions that seemed strange. He said that he had paid $10 to board his horse up the road for the night. He called himself a “drifter” and he rode his horse in from Pahrump which is a good hour drive by car around Mt Charleston. According to a techs boyfriend who fed the horse last night and gave it water the two stayed in a vacant lot up the street the guy was lying about boarding his horse for the night. He also was begining to lie aobut a lot of stuff before Garth asked him to leave. It was all pretty shady but for some reason as I heard them talk about how this drifter had ridden his horse across the desert and was just roaming around with his horse I thought what a great lifestyle that would be. Free to come and go as you pleased without anyone expecting anything from you. If he wanted to drift off to Utah or California and he could find food and water he would. It seemed like he was the master of his destiny much more than someone like me who might think he is achieving the life he seeks. It doesn’t really make a lot of logic especially given the other part of the story where animal control began to question the drifter about his horse and if he is able to care for it. The story was the he bought the horse from a lady in Pahrump who now wants the horse back. It seems more likely that he stole the horse from someone or that someone abandoned the horse and he just took over ownership. It is really endearing to me how the horse would follow him accross the road. The horse looked every bit as homeless and the man leading him but there was a sort of nobleness in the skinny horse being a companion of this drifting character. Instead of seeming like just another run of the mill vagrant probably a drug user, scoundrel, and thief who has wasted his life away making one bad choice after another, the fact he now makes his course with a horse by his side turns him into more of a don quitoe traveler tackling various challenges such as crossing a desert just to see if you can or reach the otherside. Spending a night in a vacant lot with a horse is like setting up camp on the outskirts of town like a free range cowboy would have done a hundred years ago. It is amazing what the companionship of a loyal horse can do to a mans outlook at least in my view.