Why is it bothering you to admit that farmers have a great deal of experience, Me?
Because they don't. 99.9% of farmers do not have the smallest amount of surgical skill or experience compared to even a day one vet, they are farmers not surgeons. Speaking as an Nth generation stock farmers son
In general, of course I have to agree that no farmer (except those who are vets, of course) has the
breadth of experience of a fully-trained vet. And nothing like the training to underpin decision-making when something goes wrong.
I was citing the experience in the one specific procedure and instance, being an older farmer castrating a lamb with a knife, where it’s always been a farm with several hundred ewes, and the farmer has been castrating lambs with a knife all their life. On pure numbers, that farmer has more experience of
that procedure than a modern vet is going to have.
I’m sorry that you have chosen to interpret this as a slur on the value of veterinary training and expertise. It didn’t leave me as such.
I like to live in a world where each of us is able to recognise, value and respect the experience, training and competencies of each other.
I know that some farmers can be dismissive of “college boys” (as I’ve heard them refer to the educated but often practically inexperienced people who tell them how to farm under the various environmental schemes, etc). And some vets - usually the more recently qualified ones, in my experience - can be equally dismissive of some of the old farmers and their practises.
As a well-educated woman myself, who came to farming later in life but had the opportunity to work with a third-generation farmer on the Cumbrian uplands, I found it endlessly fascinating and enormously enlightening to open myself to the benefit of that man’s lifetime’s experience, and the received wisdom of his family and friends. For sure, some of the practises he and his peers undertook could do with phasing out, but in general, if the reasoning was sound, they were not resistant to doing so. Thankfully we had an excellent vet, of farming stock himself, who treated us with respect and was accorded the same. We developed a mutually rewarding working relationship over the years.