The Rural Veterinarians’ Death Watch

What he knows and what his hands can still do.

The call comes at two in the morning, always at two in the morning, when the temperature has dropped another ten degrees and the wind carries ice crystals horizontally across Highway 20. Doc Brennan, seventy-one years old, pulls himself from bed the way he has for forty-three years, his joints protesting in a language that grows more insistent each winter.

The Jorgensens have a heifer trying to deliver backwards, and the nearest other large-animal vet works out of a clinic ninety miles away. By the time that vet could arrive, both calf and mother would be dead, taking with them about three thousand dollars the Jorgensens cannot afford to lose. So Brennan drives into the Nebraska darkness, his truck cutting through drifts that weren’t there six hours ago, toward a barn where life and death wait in the space between what he knows and what his hands can still do.

This is the arithmetic of rural collapse that nobody calculates until the bill comes due. Across Nebraska, Iowa, and Kansas, the large-animal veterinarians are dying off faster than cavalry horses after the invention of the tank. The average age creeps toward sixty, and behind them stands almost nobody.

The veterinary schools produce plenty of specialists who can perform arthroscopic surgery on a Labrador’s knee or diagnose feline diabetes, but almost none who want to spend their days arm-deep in a cow, checking pregnancies in lots of three hundred head, driving two hundred miles between calls, getting kicked, bitten, and covered in substances that suburban veterinarians encounter only in textbooks.

The new graduates emerge from school with three hundred thousand dollars in debt and discover they can make ninety thousand working regular hours in a climate-controlled suburb, or fifty thousand working around the clock in conditions that would make their classmates question their sanity.