Raising Connections
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Raising Connections
Diseases, Decisions, and Diapered Ducks 04-06-2026
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Jennifer Trout, Maryland's State Veterinarian, joins Rachann to share a day in the life of the state's top vet. Dr. Trout walks us through her approach to wellness, highlighting leadership, challenges, partnerships, and preparedness efforts that keep our critters safe. It's an open down-to-earth conversation about how Maryland protects its herds, flocks, and food systems. with steady, informed care.
Maryland Agriculture Secretary Appoints Dr. Jennifer Trout as State Veterinarian
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Today's podcast is brought to you by Mariah Bellmanor Kennel, offering dog boarding, bathing, and daycare in an eco-friendly environment. Our pet care with a personal touch is not just a motto, it's really what we do. Our touch extends to the food without preservatives, quality and natural shampoos, inclusive boarding, and a green living environment. Sounds like I might want to check in. Visit us anytime on our Facebook page, Mariah Bellmanor Kennel, or Mariah Bellmanor Kennel.com. Enjoy your program. Welcome to Raising Connections, connecting your community to others through critters, companions, commerce, and agriculture. I'm Ray Shan Mayer. Let's raise some connections. Here we go. Today, as always, we have a fun and interesting guest, Dr. Trout, Jennifer Trout, State Veterinarian from Maryland, joining us. Can you introduce yourself and tell us where you're from?
SPEAKER_01Hi, everybody. My name is Jennifer Trout. I'm the Maryland State Veterinarian with the Maryland Department of Agriculture. I'm a native of Harford County, Maryland. Woo-woot. Been here, there hither and yon, but now I'm back in this great state. So thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_00As a state veterinarian, what does that really mean? Do you see every dog and cat in the entire state? No, which is a good thing, could you imagine?
SPEAKER_01It's interesting because as the state veterinarian, we really don't see any dogs and cats. We regulate them a little bit, but the majority of my position is dealing with livestock in the state and regulatory medicine and import regulations and export regulations and disease.
SPEAKER_00So let me make sure I have this clear because I bet we just had some listeners go, What? Yeah. You're working with livestock and disease regulation and food. Yes. So who's working with the dogs and cats?
SPEAKER_01There is a public health veterinarian through the Department of Health. They focus on dog and cat diseases. But interestingly enough, we work together when we have, you know, if a dog comes up with lawsonia or tularemia or brucellosis because those are like a zoonotic disease and can infect humans as well. We kind of talk on the phone, come up with a game plan, but he's usually the one that reaches out to dog and cat donors.
SPEAKER_00What would a normal day for you look like? Is there such a thing as a normal day?
SPEAKER_01No, it's never a normal day. And it depends on the time of year.
SPEAKER_00So seasons regulate much like farming is regulated by seasons. Correct. Seasons regulate your day. Correct. We're in the spring, early spring. There's a lot of mud. There's a lot of pollen. There's a lot of breeding that's going on right about now. Yep. Does that affect your day?
SPEAKER_01Sure does. Let's pick a species. Equine-wise, sure does. You know, regulatory diseases that we deal with in horses in the state, EHV is a familiar friend from the past few months. And then Strangles is something that we never seem to be able to get rid of. Ironically, last year, this time, I thought it would be great to take Strangles off of our reportable disease list in the state. And I apparently I manifested that into the universe, and then Strangles said, Hold my beer and let me show you what I can do. So we've had an ongoing Strangles, I'm not going to say outbreak, but various incidences throughout the year from about last April to say two weeks ago. We've probably had 25 barns that have had a strangles case within the state.
SPEAKER_00And Strangles is a disease that affects horses. Yes. And infects horses as well as affects horses. Yes. Sort of like diphtheria in people, but in but in horses. Okay. Yeah. For our non-horse folks out there.
SPEAKER_01Yes. Yeah, I think that's a good analogy. Definitely an interesting disease from not only the way that it appears, you know, in the clinical signs and things like that. But then if you think back to like disease transmission and you think, okay, how did it get here or how did it get there? And then when you review, oh, well, I had a horse that took a lesson here and it was at this barn, and then I went home and that barn broke out with strangles. And now I'm seeing those signs at the barn where I bored, a lot comes into play with disease transmission.
SPEAKER_00Is that part of your normal day?
SPEAKER_01Yes. Almost epidemiology and tracking cases down? Yep, looking for epi links, things like that, issuing quarantine orders for those facilities, evaluating. We get all those test results into the office from the referring veterinarian saying, Hey, we've got a problem with Tommy, the quarter horse down the road. Can you help us out providing kind of outreach materials and biosecurity on the disease? We try to post things on not only our webpage, but our social media accounts so that people are aware that these things are happening. So it's a way of kind of keeping a track of the disease in the state and monitoring it and then trying to educate our constituents about, you know, what's the current problem.
SPEAKER_00In a normal day, we've just discussed equine. Would your day only be equine or would it be all of the other livestock?
SPEAKER_01Well, depending on the day. Right now, because it's rolling into spring, we've got some HPAI or avian influenza rolling around in the state. So that's been on the radar since before Christmas. We've had six cases, five this year, and then the one before Christmas. So it's always a little sprinkling of various things.
SPEAKER_00You have these sprinklings of diseases, and that really makes the donut analogy with sprinkles really different. So you have a sprinkling of illness. Is your job to track the illness or to create wellness?
SPEAKER_01I would say both. Obviously, we have to track the illness so we can monitor facilities nearby, things like that, if you think about stables and boarding facilities. When you think about avian influenza and our poultry outbreaks on the Delmarva, we're monitoring neighboring commercial prims and backyard flocks and things like that so that we were routinely testing them to begin with before they go to harvest to ensure that we're providing a safe source of protein to the public. But then when we have an outbreak, we double down on that. And then there's certain time frames that we put on those control zones. You know, you're within a seven kilometer range of this infected prem. We now need you to test every week and make sure that your birds are okay. So definitely monitoring and then trying to control or educate. You know, that's kind of a side gig to it. We have a great team of field inspectors in our program that love to share information with people, which I think is fantastic. We all try to be very good about educating. We're not extension, but we do want to provide people resources if they need them and have people understand that we're not the big bad wolf coming to prevent you from doing something. We want to help you keep your animals healthy, make sure that whatever is entering the food supply is safe. If you're working with horses, that they're safe. We have a huge equine industry in the state. So we're always paying attention to the various species and what's going on so we can make sure that we're protecting Maryland's poultry flock as a whole, or our equine herd as a whole, or our cattle herd as a whole, so that something that's happening in, say, Howard County doesn't end up happening in another county, or from one neighbor to another.
SPEAKER_00In the medical world, you hear the CDC, the Center for Disease Control, has issued, but there's not really something like that for the veterinarians. Is that the state veterinarian's role to issue that for the state?
SPEAKER_01Yes. So whenever we have something happen, we'll send out a letter that goes to all the licensed vets and vet techs in the state saying, hey, we've had an EHV outbreak and we are altering our import regulations for horses. This is what's happened, this is why, this is how long we think it'll be in effect. You know, we may not know that, how long it's going to be in effect, but once it subsides and we feel comfortable, then we'll release those restrictions. The same thing with HPAI, whether it's in birds or it's in dairy cattle, it's our office that says alert, this is what's going on. And we do that in conjunction with USDA, of course. You know, when they put together an order saying we can't move lactating dairy cattle in the nation without um milk tests for bird flu, avian influenza. You know, we obviously support that and we get that out to who needs to know that information so that those cattle can be tested accordingly.
SPEAKER_00Just so our listeners really caught exactly what you just said and why the veterinarian's job is so different. The lactating dairy cows need to be tested for a bird flu virus. Correct.
SPEAKER_01How does that work? Well, differently than how you test a bird, so I guess that's a good thing. Although in my days of being a cattle vet, it wouldn't bother me testing them that way, I guess. But I digress. Avian influenza kind of has a misnomer of a name, right? Because we all call it bird flu, avian influenza, highly pathogenic avian influenza, but as we all know, it can affect other species besides birds. When it was discovered that dairy cattle could contract avian influenza in 2024, the name stuck, right, wrong, or indifferent. But then it was decided per USDA that any lactating cattle moving within the country, so from state to state, not necessarily within a state, needed to be tested. So you take a milk sample to test dairy cows. And then states that actually had avian influenza cases in dairy cattle would also test cattle within the state for movement. And then as that whole thing ramped up, it became a national milk testing strategy and all of those fun things that Maryland's been involved with. And proud to say that we're stage four. And stage four is stage four is no HPAI in the state of Maryland.
SPEAKER_00And that's why we need someone to help us understand, because stage four in other places is not a good thing. Stage four in this case is a very good thing.
SPEAKER_01Right, because it varies between whatever disease we're talking about or whatever program is being implemented. So in this case, you definitely don't want to be stage three, and you really want to be stage four, or five, which would be when the whole country is considered HPAI free in dairy cattle.
SPEAKER_00So your day never looks the same twice, and you're ready to talk about everything from cattle to viruses to birds to cleanliness and hygiene and sanitization and transport and legislation. How in the world did you wake up one morning and say, you know what? I want to be the state vet. Yeah, that's a good question.
SPEAKER_01That's something that I don't think that I ever had on my radar from when I was five years old and couldn't pronounce veterinarian at Bible school at William Waters Church on a summer morning. I well, I knew I wanted to be a veterinarian, but I said vegetarian instead. But we might go hand in hand. We've ever grown from that. Yeah, it's definitely a career path that I never ever thought would happen for me. I always wanted to be a cow vet, a dairy vet. That was my goal. I managed to get my goal. I practiced in the dairy mecca of the United States, which is Tulary County, California. Saw things in probably three months' time that it takes vets in other states, you know, a 20-year career to see. Worked in corporate, worked for some various companies in pharmaceuticals, nutrition, things like that, dabbled in small animal medicine when we returned to Maryland. And then I knew that the department was looking for a state vet. And I said, you know what? I think I have a diverse background to make this work. And having grown up here and showed cattle here and, you know, farmed here and all of those things, I thought I could do the job. And so apparently somebody else agreed. And here we've been for, I think, 16, 17 months now, and so far so good, I think.
SPEAKER_00You've been through a heck of a trial within the equestrian community. And when I say trial, I mean almost trial and error or a trial of your skills, however you want to interpret that word. I think it might fit. With the EHV equine herpes virus outbreak, there was a lot of moving parts with that. And a piece that many of our listeners ask was one virus can be three different things. Things.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00How do you track something like that? And how do you keep the knowledge moving? Because institutions are always developing new knowledge, right? Which means the folks on the ground working with the horses may not have all the knowledge because they're working with horses. Right. How do you do that?
SPEAKER_01That was a lot. So all of the state veterinarians had a phone call, conference call. I was driving home from Annapolis. We're on this conference call about this outbreak from Texas and Oklahoma. Everybody's listening. The Texas veterinarian and the Oklahoma State Veterinarian are talking about what they knew, this outbreak how it was occurring. And I'm turning down my road. And I'm thinking, well, you know, we're in Maryland. We'll be okay. Got to the end of my driveway, and the Oklahoma State vets on the phone saying, Hey, Dr. Trout, we've had a trace back to Maryland, and there's possibly two horses from your state that were at one of these events. Huh. Wow. As you're turning in your driveway. As I'm turning in my driveway. And I'm it kind of brings it home. It does. And we also have horses. So, you know, I have an appreciation for one, the events that they were at because we have quarter horses. Two, again, we have this huge industry in the state. So none of this is lost on me. Was I surprised? Yes. But if you think about how animals move now all over the country and people participate in shows all over the place, I guess not surprising. So fast forward within the hour, we knew that those horses hadn't returned to Maryland and they were actually now permanently located in Texas. So we didn't have that concern, but our concern was well, what if someone was at one of these events or horses were coming in for some other reason? There were so many variables, and everyone in the country was looking at all of these variables because, again, the touch and the reach of EHV is shockingly impressive. You know, you and I could have horses at an event unbeknownst to both of us, one of our horses infected. We don't even know each other, but we happen to be in the same boutique looking at the same sweater, and I brush up against the sweater, and it's my horse that's infected. You then take the sweater and decide to purchase it, put the sweater on, go back and brush your horse. And next thing you know, now your horse is infected.
SPEAKER_00Because that virus can live.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it likes to live on foamites. And foamites would be the sweater.
SPEAKER_00Correct. The thing that passes it. Correct.
SPEAKER_01So it was a big deal. And I know that it was very frustrating for people. And I'm sure some people thought that we were overzealous in what we were asking people to do. But again, my concern as the state vet, I have to protect the entire herd of horses that are in Maryland. And I have to ask you at times to do things that you may not want to do or you may not feel is necessary, say in your situation, but I need to ask you to do that. You need to do that for me because I need you to help me protect your neighbor.
SPEAKER_00So going back to that donut, if there's sprinkles on the top of that donut, that's the disease. A little bits here, a little bits there. But that whole icing is the herd. Correct. And that's what you're protecting. It's the wellness, not the disease. You're protecting the wellness. Yep. I don't think I'll ever look at a donut the same. I don't think I will either. Birds and dairy and sheep and pigs are all in our state as well. And some goats. And some goats. Lots of goats. Lots of goats. There's something that happens in that world that doesn't always happen in other worlds. For example, birds are chickens. I like chicken for dinner sometimes. But then there are songbirds outside that aren't regulated by anything except Mother Nature's paths. But they can all be affected by the same biologic issues. How the heck do you regulate the unregulatable?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the unregulatable. Maybe that needs to be a meme because that's definitely a challenge. You know, when we have these outbreaks of avian influenza at these poultry farms or in a backyard flock, 99% of the time we can trace them back to a wild bird introduction. And if somebody could figure out a way to put a diaper on Canadian geese, wouldn't that be lovely? Right? Because we have no control over that. And it's definitely been interesting. It's been eye-opening to me. And then I try to share with everyone the amount of fecal material from an infected bird that you can put on the top of a dime can infect one million birds. So something that you're not even noticing that you may walk through. I'm walking my dog around a pond. There's geese there. I'm not paying attention. I'm going home. I have backyard chickens. I love my copper merans. I'm going to go feed them. And next thing you know, your copper merans are sick and dying. And you bring them to us and we test them for avian influenza. And sure enough, they're positive. Because again, it's something so small and minute, a la EHV, very parallel from a transmission standpoint. Absolutely. It's really scary. And it's, I don't want to say it's a crapshoot. Get the pun there. I got the pun. That's good. It is in a way because I can't control Mother Nature.
SPEAKER_00Does the same thing happen with deer? We hear a lot of information about deer population and hunting and consumption of deer. And one of the things that becomes more and more popular every year is deer meat being consumed by folks who are not hunters. Yes. Nor are they the same people who are processing the deer. Yes. When the deer is being harvested for consumption, there are things that can be seen in that processing that alerts the person who may be consuming, selling, sharing that meat that it should not be consumed. If people are not educated, or maybe they don't have a tradition, or there's something new. Wow, that could be a big problem because now we're consuming wild game, which there's nothing wrong with. Right. But what do we need to know? And how do we make that connection?
SPEAKER_01Is that you? That's DNR for sure. So we have a lot of chronic wasting disease or episonotic hemorrhagic disease. And foamy lung. Yeah. And we will see those test results. So somebody harvests a deer and the deer looks weird. So then they will contact DNR. DNR will either send us samples or send like NBSL samples in Ames. When those results come back, DNR usually takes that meat, right? Because they know that that deer is hanging in limbo. They're not going to sell the meat. So then they'll grab that meat and destroy it. We just had that like a month ago. They wanted to destroy X number of pounds of deer that had been processed but not sold yet because of CWD. But that's them more than us.
SPEAKER_00But this is an example of how everything works together. Yep. That communication has to be something else because having grown up on a farm, I know the deer jump the fences. They jump in front of cars. But they jump fences, they get into the cattle area, they get into the horse area, they get into the sheep, the goats, the whatever, and they're sharing some grain with them because they've learned that they've got really good tasting, high quality nutrition up there, and we would like it. Do those deer diseases, much like the wild bird diseases, transfer over to the livestock?
SPEAKER_01Some can, but then some we're safe with. Like the lung, the episonotic, hemorrhagic, blah, blah, blah. One. Those don't. But if you think about CWD, it's a prion disease. So it's similar to like your BSE and your Kreutzfeld Jakob in small ruminants, but it's specific to the deer.
SPEAKER_00And so that harkens back to a while back when the disease was known as mad cow. Yes. Interesting. Yes. And there were regulations around that. It changed a lot of cattle farmers. It changed the way a lot of cattle farming was done because of the different diseases.
SPEAKER_01Is that part of your job? Yeah. What is your job? Yeah. So we have an agreement with USDA where we sample so many cattle a year for BSE to make sure that the state is BSE free. And we also do that with scrapie in sheep. Those are all things that we monitor and make sure that we can provide those samples to USDA. So when you're taking a steer to harvest and something doesn't seem right at the butcher shop, they will call USDA. USDA will then take a sample, they will bring it to us, we will put it together. And it does go to NVSL. So we're not testing them at our lab, but we're helping them get those samples out to where they need to go. So another teamwork between a federal government agency and a state agency to make sure that what's happening in our state provides a safe, wholesome, healthy source of protein to the people that live here.
SPEAKER_00That makes sense. Let me ask this one because this is kind of on the fringes. So you ready to jump just a little bit? Sure. Vaccination has been a big topic. And since about 2020, vaccines have really become a topic of conversation. A lot of the livestock that is consumed in the food chain has been vaccinated to protect whom? The consumer or the livestock?
SPEAKER_01Livestock vaccines are created to protect the livestock and not the consumer. All livestock vaccines for food animals, I guess I should say, do have a withdrawal on them. So again, we all know that we don't let animals that have antibiotics enter the food chain. Those are routinely tested. Milk is routinely tested, all of those things. Well, every vaccine for food animal also has a withdrawal time on that vaccine before that animal could be sent to slaughter. So no different than I have a cow that has pneumonia. I've treated her with antibiotics. I know that I cannot sell her for harvest until that antibiotic is out of her system. So if that's, you know, 21 days, you're gonna wait 21 days. Hopefully she gets better. But if she doesn't and she needs to do something else, you know, you need to have her clear of antibiotics. So that's the same with vaccines. They all have a withdrawal on them. So if I was going to administer a vaccine today and I decided that I needed to get rid of that animal for whatever reason, it wasn't doing well. Well, ended up getting sick, et cetera, I would still have to hold on to that animal again for say 21 days before it could go to harvest to make sure that nothing is entering the food chain that may not harm, but if we think about like super bugs and antibiotic resistance. Transposons. So if we're trying to avoid all of those things, that's why these withdrawals are put into place.
SPEAKER_00That makes sense. Here's a piece that just doesn't connect for me. So we're keeping our herds safe and healthy and caring for them. The animal husbandry, the farmers are caring for those animals, so that they are sending high-quality meats to processing. But oftentimes I read in the newspaper the whole flock was destroyed. They're obviously not getting better, nor are they going to the food supply. Does that mean that there's not a vaccine or a wellness program for those animals?
SPEAKER_01So if we're talking about avian influenza, when a flock tests positive for avian influenza, the USDA Red Book, which is basically the Bible of what we do when we have a positive flock and the guidelines for what we follow. The requirement is that the entire flock is depopulated. Avian influenza is a miserable disease to see in a bird. It's absolutely horrible. So the thought is that we are eradicating the disease at that location. And say you have two barns and one barn tested positive, and the barn next door didn't test positive, but we don't know that they're not infected and they wouldn't three days from now test positive. So the thought is that we depopulate the entire premise so that we can eradicate the disease, so that we can protect, again, our neighbors from contracting the disease as well.
SPEAKER_00Wellness, keeping everybody well.
SPEAKER_01Yes. There are vaccines. We don't have them approved in the United States yet. Everybody's working on that. There's just a lot of issues surrounding the use of those vaccines that once that gets kind of sorted out and settled and approved, and we have confidence in trials and experiences in other countries that we can then hopefully implement them in the states.
SPEAKER_00In the beginning of this interview, I asked you, did you wake up one morning and decided you wanted to be the state vet? And you said, Well, I had this diverse background. Is that something that if we have listeners out there going, you know what? I want to be the state vet. What do you tell them? You you didn't start off to do this. You were a dairy farmer. How did you get where you are?
SPEAKER_01Convoluted journey of switchbacks up a mountain, I guess. I don't even know if that's a good analogy. Life. Just gotcha there. Yeah. You know, I think for me, being a food animal vet and being a dairy vet and being in various places taught me a lot of things. And I guess that was my thought when at a certain point in my life, this opportunity was available. And in my head, I was thinking, my background in various things might help in this position. Again, it's nothing that I ever, ever thought that I would do. But I do think working with various livestock and experiencing TB outbreaks in California and when BSE was found in the States, I was in California, and all of those things help you navigate. And trying to control disease and mitigate disease at large farms really makes you kind of think a different way. And I felt that that was applicable to what we're trying to do here in Maryland and what the state vet does for Maryland.
SPEAKER_00So you know you want to go out there and work with disease and livestock and go through the switchbacks and see where you end up.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Right. Because just like with anything, all of your experiences in life that you have, good or bad, make you the person that you are and make you succeed at something. And I also think if you're not willing to learn something new, regardless of your age, then you need to work on that because you always need to be in a learning mode. Absolutely. It's been a great position and a great job. And I learn something new every day because there's so many different species. I mean, I'm definitely not a poultry veterinarian. And it's very parallel to being a dairy veterinarian, especially when you're a dairy vet that worked on large dairies, the way that things are managed and the things that you think about. So for me, it's been interesting to apply those skills to what I need to know about poultry as a state vet.
SPEAKER_00You've talked so much about teamwork and coordination and switchbacks in life bringing you together and this amalgam of all kinds of interesting things, but yet there are these little skills that nobody really talks about that without them, I have a sneaking suspicion that the teamwork and the coordination would fall to pieces. Where does a veterinarian hone their communication skills?
SPEAKER_01Well, you know, for me, it was dealing with multiple clients and those clients every week. When you do large dairy work, I would go to your farm every Monday and we would preg check. And I'm not only working with you, but I'm working with your entire workforce, whether we're preg checking cows or we're vaccinating calves, and they're not necessarily the same people, or we're evaluating your parlor, talking about mastitis. So you have to be able to communicate with a variety of people from the owner of an operation down to the lady that's feeding calves and is noticing that her calves are off. And then besides that group of people, when it comes to being in a food, animal, ag vocation, you're dealing with the people from the semen company, the people from the nutrition company, the guy that comes and wants you to use his antibiotic because he works for X pharmaceutical company, but you've been using Y and differentiating why do I want to use X over Y or not? And you're always conscientious about the budget that these farms have and how you can save them money and make them money and all of those things. So you get a quick education in having to work with a variety of people from different aspects of ag and how to make all of that work together and kind of smoothly. And I mean, you have to have a team everywhere to make it work. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00Teamwork makes it come together. No one can do it by themselves. Yeah. You shared off-air something I thought was completely fascinating. You did your veterinary education in Florida. Yes. You were the only dairy student in the entire class. Yes. There's a lot of people that drink milk.
SPEAKER_01Yes. You'd think there'd be more dairy vets.
SPEAKER_00Right. Yeah. And in Maryland, we've lost a lot of dairy farms. Yeah. But the dairy farms that are around are really productive. And what we've learned in programs is that it's not the giant dairy farms that make all the milk. It's all the little dairy farms that make all the milk. Yeah. How do you go from a class of one to all that milk? Are we missing the veterinarians taking care of these animals?
SPEAKER_01You know, if you think about a class in a veterinary school, say there's a hundred people, you know, what percentage of them want to do small animal? 80, 85%, right? So there's 85 students that want to do small animal. There's probably five that want to do equine. So now we're up to 90, a handful that want to do, say, mixed animal practice and exotic, and then a handful that want to do just straight livestock. It's definitely changed. And I guess it mimics, I don't want to say society, but the population as a whole, the amount of people that depend on a small microcosm of the country to feed them. So it parallels that. And not that you have to be from a farm to be a large animal veterinarian by any means, but it takes somebody to appreciate that part of veterinary medicine that wants to pursue it because it's not easy. You know, you're not in an air-conditioned building, you don't have a nine to five, you can have 10 emergency calls in a day, you can get kicked, squashed. It's a lifestyle and a passion.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. If someone's looking at going into veterinary school, in the Midwest, we call them veterinaries. Yes, you do. We do not call them veterinarians. I did not learn that until I was in my, well say mature that we don't call the doc the vet, we call them the veterinarian. Who knew that had so many syllables in it? Right. Hence the reason I said vegetarian. Yes. Because they're very we all went to the vet. If you have someone who would like to become a veterinarian, what are the things that they should consider? Wow. That's a really broad one. That's a broad one. Is it all about grades?
SPEAKER_01I don't think so. No. I think you need to have good grades, and I think you need to be diverse and you need to have experience. When I was interviewed for vet school, one of the professors that interviewed me said, Well, aren't you concerned that you don't have any small animal experience and you haven't worked in a kennel and you haven't this and you haven't that? And I said, Well, are you concerned that no other candidates worked on a dairy and done X, Y, and Z like I have? Which really, I think, made them pause because not everybody is around peg sticking in a round hole. You know, you can have the square peg that has other unique experiences that they can bring to a vet school class and succeed and then be a great veterinarian. Be yourself.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Be who you are, be authentic, and ask questions. Yes. And don't stop learning. Ever. Ever. When we started, we said it's spring. There's mud, there's flowers, and there's lots of new animals coming along. What's the greatest challenge that you want to let the general public know about for spring from the state veterinarian's point of view?
SPEAKER_01Don't pet wild waterfowl. Help us keep avian influenza at bay. Put diapers on your geese. So we've seen an uptick in small ruminant necropsies like baby necropsies this spring because it's the season. So be diligent in paying attention to your animals that are farrowing, calving, kidding, lambing, all of those things because it can be perfectly fine now. And you go do something else and you come back and then you've got a problem. We've seen a lot of that. We've seen a lot of calf diarrhea this year, just thinking about stocking rates, and it is wet. And what can I do to control that? Again, we can't really control mother nature, but how can I reduce the environmental impact on these animals that are trying to have offspring, raise offspring, all of those things right now?
SPEAKER_00I'm gonna have you define or say in layman's terms what a stocking rate is.
SPEAKER_01So a stocking rate would be how many animals I can put in a certain area. And we're all guilty, and I will raise my hand and say I am guilty of this as a dairy farmer. I think we all are. I've got five calves in this pen, and they are doing fantastic, running around, frolicking, drinking, blah, blah, blah. Surely I'm gonna stick number six in there and everything will be fine. And then the wheels fall off the bus and things aren't fine. And not only does number six get sick, but numbers one through five also get sick because you just take for granted and assume that everything is great and it's gonna keep going great and it's not.
SPEAKER_00That's a lot for us to consider. If we have questions, where do we go? There's that wonderful team out there. Yes. How do we navigate it and where do we go with our questions to get answers?
SPEAKER_01Yes. So if anybody has questions about our programs and what we do in the state, or I mean, honestly, even if it's a random question about Scrapie in a sheep, they can call our office in Annapolis, and the great ladies that work there will direct you in the right direction. And we've got wonderful field inspectors all over the state. We have a great team of field veterinarians that are more than willing to have a conversation with anybody about certain diseases and certain things and what you can do to make your program better and your farm better and your flock better and all of those things.
SPEAKER_00What a huge job. Thank you for being out there keeping all of our sprinkles and our wellness, our fitness, our disease, and our wellness together. Thank you. More than welcome. I hope you as a listener have enjoyed the conversation, made some connections. Go enjoy the spring and look for the diaper ducks. We'll see you next time here on Raising Connections. I hope the connections we've raised today stay with you as you engage your community through critters, companions, commerce, and agriculture. Join me again next week. We'll make some more connections. This program is a production of Raising Connections Media Company, hosted and produced by Rashan Mayer and edited and mixed by Robin Temple.