Utah Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory MYSTERY CASE LAMB PLACENTA DIAGNOSES

By E. Jane Kelly, DVM, MS, MPH, DACVPM, DACVM

This case is loosely based on submissions to the Utah Vet Diagnostic Laboratory. It is spring. Lambing is due to start in a week. Several ewes have aborted lambs and have had small weak lambs that only survive for hours after birth. The owner submits several lambs and associated placentas to the diagnostic laboratory for necropsy. The fetuses are all autolyzed and the placentas look like this:

What

Anyway, once we got the funding, there were legislators who asked why we didn’t just do all four years at Logan. I told them that it was just so much money. After probably three or four years, it did get noisier and noisier with people asking why we weren’t standing alone. But Ken and I had a strong relationship with Bryan Slinker, and we felt like he had gone on the line to make this happen, so it would have been a poke in the eye to go off on our own then. After 10 years into it, though, we realized that our faculty were very, very strong and our animal facilities worked great, and the state had more demand than what we could meet through the Washington State program.

Demand exceeding capacity was one of the complications when we were starting the two-plus-two program as well. We had to talk the legislature into giving the money they using for the WICHE program to us instead, and WICHE was very unhappy with us. They started calling people to convince them not to do it. But WICHE was supporting maybe three, four students from Utah, and the twoplus-two program got us 20 from Utah plus 10 more from elsewhere.

I remember either Brigham Young University or Utah Valley University complaining in one of the hearings about WICHE funding being taken away because they feared their graduates wouldn’t be able to attend our program. It was pretty unusual at the time for a university to criticize another one like that.

We had to stress that this was open to all Utah students and that we would make sure we had good representation from all of the colleges and universities here in Utah, not just USU. But we've had more students from each of the universities come through the two-plus-two program than ever went through WICHE. And WICHE did ultimately lose that money.

We got everything together by the next year, and that’s when the first class entered the program. That class as a whole was so excited. It was inspiring to hear their stories, how long they’d wanted be veterinarians, what their backgrounds were. And now you had 30 people that were going to be able to pursue that.

We had John Mathis come at one point to speak to the students, and his talk was an eye opener. He said, “You folks have to realize you're more than a veterinarian when you graduate. You become a community leader, somebody they’ll listen to, and you need to give back to that community. You need to get involved in politics, you need to get involved in your church, you just need to get involved, whether it's with youth groups or whatever. You have more to give than just being a veterinarian, and you have to realize the stature of what you're bringing to your community.” And I thought that was a great message for these young people to hear. •