This story comes from the Wisconsin News Collaborative, a partnership of Wisconsin public media newsrooms, including WUWM, Wisconsin Public Radio, and WXPR.
Rural communities throughout Wisconsin are facing an ongoing shortage of veterinarians, leaving farmers and pet owners with limited options for animal care, especially in emergency situations.
A recent story from Wisconsin Watch investigated how this is playing out in Door County, where many pet owners have to drive an hour and a half or more to access the nearest emergency clinic. For Jessica Chase, that led to a devastating moment of losing her dog, Capri, to a bout of seizures when she couldn’t get to the vet in time after a severe snowstorm in March.
Last year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture identified a record 243 rural veterinary shortage areas across the country. This included 16 Wisconsin counties, mostly concentrated in the northern and northwest parts of the state.Bottom of Form
The veterinary care shortage is a well-documented problem going back decades, but it has seen an uptick in recent years as demand for pet care continues to rise.
Dr. Kayleigh Bull, president of the Northwestern Wisconsin Veterinary Medical Association, told WPR that the surge of pet adoptions during the COVID-19 pandemic led many veterinarians to take on dozens of additional patients, increasing already heavy caseloads.
“When 2020 hit, I suddenly was having to see 80 or 90 percent dogs and cats,” Bull said. “Everyone had time to get that puppy or that kitten that they wanted because they could be at home letting them out regularly, not at work all day.”
“There has been a big pet boom, and then there’s still the same amount of veterinarians graduating every year,” she added.
There are just over 30 accredited colleges of veterinary medicine in the United States and only one in Wisconsin, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Veterinary Medicine. The program admits 100 students per year, and the college says it has trained more than half of the practicing veterinarians in the state.
Jon Levine, dean of the School of Veterinary Medicine, told WPR that the college is currently maxed out on how many new students it can accept each year due to space constraints, but he is hopeful that the program will be able to increase enrollment in the near future.
“We are working with campus on our current educational spaces to see how we can expand them,” Levine said. “We’ve got a brand-new and renovated teaching hospital here that will allow us to grow, and has already allowed us to recruit more fourth-year visiting students from around the country. Some of those — we think about 25 percent — stay in Wisconsin.”
New state law offers to help rural vets pay off debt
To help retain more of UW’s veterinary students and send them to areas with critical need, the state passed bipartisan legislation earlier this year creating a veterinary loan repayment program. The law went into effect in April but will not be funded until it goes through the state’s budget process.
For recent graduates like Dr. Allison Leschke, the loan repayment program could make it financially possible to pursue a veterinary career in a rural part of the state, where the pay is often lower even as tuition costs remain the same.
“Coming out of vet school, you log into your student loans and you’re like, ‘Holy cats, that’s a large number!’ and you get overwhelmed,” Leschke told “Wisconsin Today.” “So knowing that there’s a (loan repayment) program that is being supported and working on funding is very relieving, honestly.”
Leschke works as a large-animal veterinarian at United Vet Services, a practice that specializes in dairy and serves Waupaca County and the surrounding area.
“It’s always been a passion of mine, especially dairy cattle,” she said. “Growing up on a dairy, I just loved working with the calves — that was our job, feeding the calves. It was so exciting to operate on all levels, from calf to cow.”
Recruiting and training aspiring livestock veterinarians has become more difficult as fewer students have farm experience or want to maintain a rural lifestyle, said Dr. Brian Darkow, board president of the Wisconsin Veterinary Medical Association. When it comes to caring for farm animals, it can be hard to achieve work-life balance.
“There’s the on-call, there’s the nights, there’s the weekends. Cows don’t take holidays — they’re not nine-to-five,” Darkow said. “There aren’t emergency clinics for our large-animal patients, so we end up being those emergency doctors as well.”
Darkow works with both large farm animals and pets at a clinic in Appleton. That mix is fairly common in the world of rural veterinary medicine. Elroy Roedel, a semi-retired veterinarian in Hayward, likened it to being a “jack of all trades.”
“In rural medicine, you often have to wear many hats, you have to do a little of everything, because that’s what practices require — to work on cats and dogs and horses and sheep and pigs and chickens,” he said. “You have to be proficient in all species.”
Rural veterinarians struggle to make ends meet
For some rural veterinarians, the math leads them back to working in city clinics that have steadier work and often pay higher salaries. Fresh out of vet school, Bull started her career at a mixed-animal practice in Menomonie, where she spent half of her time with pets and the other half with farm animals. She later switched to working at a larger clinic in Eau Claire to help pay off student loans.
“The financial restraints of that job are really difficult given the amount of debt that you put yourself into becoming a vet,” she said. “I chose to go into the rural profession, where I was needed. I loved it. I did not want to leave, but I had to in the end.”
Now, Bull is just over halfway through paying off her own student loans, with nearly a decade to go. She said it’s significant that, unlike the USDA’s Veterinary Medicine Loan Repayment Program, Wisconsin’s new law will allow veterinarians to split their time between farm animals and pets. This is crucial for rural veterinarians, she said, who need to be able to take on whatever patient load comes their way to help stay in business.
“We just need more young people coming into these rural areas and then staying there and not feeling like they’re drowning,” she said.
