During his presidency
During my
presidency the Animal Technician Program was just beginning. I wrote the first letter to suggest that we
have a veterinary school in the state of Wisconsin, and it was a little bit
premature. Dr. Glenn Downing followed me
as president, and he pursued it and did more work on it than I did.
During my
term, we were having a big problem trying
to get veterinarians to be the only people that could do surgery such as
horse castrations. There were quite a
few different things under that bill, and I don’t remember where it went
through. The other was that we had a lot
of court problems, because we had a lay person who was trying to do pregnancy
exams. He ruptured a corpus luteum and
caused the abortion of a very valuable animal.
That was all in litigation at the time that I was president. Dr. Bill O’Rourke was handling that because
he was in Madison. We didn’t get a
chance to do much more that year because that litigation was going on.
The Animal
Technician Program was just beginning. I wrote the first letter to suggest that
we have a veterinary school in the state of Wisconsin, and it was a little bit
premature. Dr. Glenn Downing followed me as president, and he pursued it and
did a lot more work on it than I did.
During my term, we were having a big problem trying to
get veterinarians to be the only people that could do surgery such as horse
castrations. There were quite a few different things under that bill, and I
don't even remember whether it went through. The other thing was that we had a
lot of court problems, because we had a lay person who was trying to do
pregnancy exams. He ruptured a corpus luteum and caused the abortion of a very
valuable animal. That was all in litigation at the time that I was president.
Dr. O'Rourke was handling that because he was in Madison. We didn't get a
chance to do much more that year because that litigation was going on.
Local association meetings
I visited
all the groups in the state and tried to get increased communications between
them because we had a problem. We did not have real good communications between
everybody at that time. And I think it helped. Those things were probably the
greatest challenge during the time that I served as president.
I had a good
rapport with nearly all of them and they were very acceptable. We didn't have
any arguments or anything and we discussed some of these various things.
Nothing was really achieved. Now, whether that was my fault or not, I'm not
sure.
Veterinary school issue
It was suggested to me by other
veterinarians that maybe we should have a veterinary school. Not only other
veterinarians, but other people of the state were thinking that maybe we should
have one. As a matter of fact, I think the feeling of a lot of the
veterinarians at that time was that we didn't need a veterinary school. People
were feeling that there would be competition that they didn't want at that
time. Not very many veterinarians were broadminded about such things. They had
a fear. We decided to let the ball rolling start rolling, so I wrote the first
letter, then Dr. Downing picked up the ball there. What really happens when
you're the president of something, for one term, you
don't really get credit for anything you start. It's done
down the road another year or two. That's kind of the way it happened here.
Veterinarians
didn't realize how big having a school could be, how much good a state school,
a university school, like that could be. Everybody was just a little bit
narrow-minded about it. We have to mark it up as progress and we were
progressing. Remember, this was the late 1960s. There were a lot of things that
we bad a fear of then that really we shouldn't have, but we did.
Relationship with Dr. O'Rourke
I am the type
of an individual who doesn't make things happen. I let things happen. I've been
sorry all of my life that I do that. I am progressive and aggressive to a
certain extent, but I don't really make things happen. When you have a person
like Bill was, he really did a lot for us that we didn't realize because he was
very capable. He was gung-ho to do it. Of course, the fact that he left
veterinary medicine and got that funeral home thing gave him time to do a lot
of this. He was also in a location to do it, which made it very nice. He was a
take-charge guy. I consider that during my presidency I don't think I did
anything anybody will remember.
I remember
the big thing was that Bill O'Rourke as executive secretary even ran the
executive board. He was pretty much in control. I'm not saying it derogatorily,
I'm just saying he really took over.
Veterinary practice
We were
probably the practice in the state of Wisconsin that sent more cattle out. We
had six cattle dealers who we did tuberculosis and blood testing for here in
the Watertown area. As far as the veterinary practice, Dr. Foster and I were
alone for many, many years and then Dr. Senek came with us later. It was
primarily because we had done artificial insemination.
We built the
practice and still did artificial insemination. Then we found out we were too
busy for it, but that helped us to do the pregnancy exams and bovine
reproduction. I sort of specialized in bovine reproduction and pregnancy exams.
When I left I had 16 or 20 herds on a health program. That was just beginning.
Dr. Arsberger was here, but he was not real active. As a matter of fact, he
lived to be 96. He kept up his license until he was probably 94 and didn't do
very much in his older age. But he was here.
Dr. Arsberger was a very distinguished person, was an
excellent horse practitioner and did practice back in the horse-and-buggy days.
It was fun to talk to him about it.
The
brucellosis program was where we did a lot of blood testing. We blood tested a
lot of cattle on that brucellosis. I think it was a good job. The best job,
however, was after we did that and they started being concerned about cost.
When they started doing the examination of cattle at the abattoirs, that was
probably the most effective tuberculosis control we had. We had lots of
brucellosis and I think we did a good job, but the vaccination programs and the
false-positives were a big problem for us for a long time.
We tried to
play pretty straight and we did follow the calfhood, but we also tried to
enhance it, and we did a lot of it. Part of that came because we did do
artificial insemination and we had a good working relationship with all these
farmers so that they listened to us as far as the reproductive angles were
concerned, so we had a good reproductive practice. I think we did some good by
vaccinating and promoting vaccinations.
We did not
vaccinate adult cows. We didn't believe in it for one thing because, now, the
old story, of course, if you had a herd that had 20 head and they lose 18
calves, next year you weren't going to have any anyway. Vaccination was not a
part of that. They vaccinated themselves and that was good, partly because we
were involved in an awful lot of blood testing for animals going out of state
and
selling between cattle dealers. We didn't want to
vaccinate adult because we knew we'd have reactors and we didn't want to have
any, so we avoided that. It was considered illegal and so we didn't do it. I
understand that a lot of it was being done. How much good they got out of it, I
don't know.
No comments:
Post a Comment