Cattle breeder fears life-or-death calving decisions amid rural Manitoba veterinarian shortage

For large animal producers in Manitoba, having access to a veterinarian can mean life or death for their animals.

Dianne Riding runs a cow-calf operation near Lake Francis, Man., 70 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg. She said during calving season, when a cow needs an emergency C-section she counts on a vet being able to help — but worries that aid will not always be there.

"We've gotten left out in the cold on the large animal side," Riding said. "We are lacking vets greatly."

While she hasn't experienced the anxiety of a vet not being there in a time of need, some of her friends struggled to find help during calving season last year.

"That's really hard on a producer because we try to breed these cows to be trouble-free ... but sometimes Mother Nature just plays bad tricks," Riding said.

"When you're told you have to phone other clinics to hopefully try and find another vet ... and if you can't get a vet out and you cannot get that calf out of that cow … maybe your only option is you euthanize this cow."

The Prairies have seen a growing large animal veterinarian shortage for the last 20 years. The Manitoba Veterinary Medical Association said there are 147 veterinary practices in Manitoba — 70 of these practices are large animal or mixed, and 63 are at least 30 kilometres outside of Winnipeg and considered rural.

There are at least 68 veterinarian positions that need to be filled in Manitoba to meet current demands.

It's a scary situation because there's no end in sight to the shortage, Riding said, even though the government and veterinarian associations are trying to build a more robust rural veterinarian system.

"I don't know any solutions, I just know that it seems to get tougher and tougher," Riding said.

Looking for solutions

Allison Pylypjuk, past Manitoba Veterinary Medical Association president, is a dairy veterinarian practicing out of the Beausejour Animal Hospital.

She graduated from Saskatoon's Western College of Veterinary Medicine in 2011 along with about 80 other students. Pylypjuk said around a dozen of her fellow graduates wanted to go into large animal medicine.

Due to the veterinary shortage, demands for care have increased, Pylypjuk said, creating a stressful situation for veterinarians trying to meet the need of clients.

"It's difficult to sustain a single-person practice ... in rural Manitoba because it's very unfair or difficult for a veterinarian to be on call 24/7. It doesn't allow you to have a balanced lifestyle and can lead to burnout."

Pylypjuk is the co-chair of the Association's ad hoc rural forum committee. The committee, which launched three years ago, advocates for veterinarian schools and the province to get more veterinarians in Manitoba.

The province announced in September that the Western College of Veterinary Medicine in Saskatoon — the veterinary school closest to Manitoba — has added five seats, raising the number of graduates to 20.

While Pylypjuk is happy to hear these seats are growing and the government is listening, she said, more work needs to be done.

"Access to veterinary care ... is at the forefront of all of this," Pylypjuk said.

"We want to make sure that everybody in the province, whether you live in Winnipeg or live rurally, have access to veterinary care and I think that's really important."

Increasing the number of doctors and veterinary technologists coming to Manitoba and tapping into foreign doctors is part of the puzzle, she said, but there also needs to be more emphasis placed on using larger multi-person practices so medical coverage can be shared between multiple veterinarians.

Chris Bell, president of the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association, practices equine medicine out of Headingley, Man., 20 kilometres west of Winnipeg.

A workforce study by the association in 2020 showed the number of graduating veterinarians going into mixed and large animal medicine was dropping. It estimated around 3.5 to four per cent of vets are leaving the industry per year, and schools aren't keeping up to fill these vacancies.

The association is working to improve the number of veterinarians going into mixed and large animal practice, Bell said. That includes working with the veterinary colleges and provincial governments to increase the number of student seats with most of the veterinary schools in Canada.

In the short term, vets are looking at out-of-the-box solutions, like using veterinary technologists and telemedicine in better ways for mixed and large animal care, Bell said, and emphasizing preventative health care for animals.

"A lot of these programs [to increase graduate seats] are early in development and just starting out, but we're hoping that we're going to be able to see some of the students returning back and going back to rural areas."