Separate a calf from its mother and you’ll hear about it.
“So, they’re lactating still, so they’re a little bit pissed off because their babies are getting kidnapped, just for a minute, like, while we work them, and then they’ll get put back together,” veterinarian Melinda McCall explains. “Once we finish, you won’t hear a peep—not a peep.”
It’s a freezing cold morning at Mount Ida Farm in Albemarle County, home to 130 mother cows and just as many babies. Chaps-wearing farmhands channel uncertain heifers into a holding pen where McCall and veterinary assistant Bekah Ritchie poke them with vaccines, sprinkle them with dewormer, and check their hindquarters.
“7035,” calls Ritchie.
“She’s pregnant,” says McCall to the farm manager taking notes. “Easy, girl. She’s about two and a half. There, there, girl.”
It takes less than two minutes per animal, and McCall and Ritchie are pink-cheeked from the effort. They’re also respectful, even as McCall probes each cow for an ultrasound, a long yellow plastic glove shimmied up her right arm.
“Nine times out of ten, they don’t kick when you’re in their rectum,” McCall says. “I just touch, and I’m like, ‘I’m here,’ and they’re like, ‘OK,’ and then, so it’s not just such a like ‘Boom.’ That would be, nobody would want that. Your baby’s coming, she is.”
Agriculture is Virginia’s largest private industry. Cattle sales and dairy products are Virginia’s second and fourth biggest farm commodities, respectively, and together produced more than a billion dollars in 2024, according to state data.
But large animal veterinarians who tend the food supply like McCall are a dying breed. Since 1945, the U.S. has lost 90% of its large animal veterinarians. Of the roughly 133,000 American vets today, just over three percent—about 4,000—work with production animals, like McCall does.
More than half of McCall’s patients are cattle. The rest are sheep, goats, llamas, alpacas, and the occasional hot-tempered pot-bellied pig and agri-tourism mini cow. In addition to primary care, McCall treats injuries and infections, does artificial insemination, prescribes and oversees medications, including antibiotics, and educates farmers and veterinary students.
She also helps laboring animals, like “36,” a Fluvanna County homesteader’s over-pregnant sheep, who’s stamping uncomfortably in her pen.
“It’s OK, hey, hey, hey, hey,” McCall says, checking the sheep. “She’s just not quite dilated yet, you know to bring it out of there right now. I think we’re going to have to induce her … that or do a C-section on her.”
In Virginia, recent legislation provided four $110,000 grants to large animal veterinarians who work in rural areas, money that will likely be part of the budget for next fiscal year, too. Federal vet school loan repayment and state pipeline programs help too, but the job's challenges keep many away.
“All animals, of course, like all humans, don’t necessarily get sick, you know, between 9 and 5.”
Virginia state veterinarian Charlie Broaddus works for the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.
“The time to demands, in addition to the geography, is a big factor as well,” says Broaddus. “I don’t know any large animal veterinarians that haven’t gotten hurt throughout their practice career. It’s an issue of wearing out knees and shoulders over a long period of time, as well as just the emergency thing that you just never, never know what’s going to happen with, you know, a crazy cow or horse may just bump into the veterinarian that’s right next to it, and knock somebody down and can get very badly hurt.”
McCall has broken bones in her fingers to her feet, and injured her spine and skull.
“I think you have to work up to the physicality of this job,” McCall says. “People think of the 'gee whiz’ injuries you can get, but, most of the time, it’s the day-to-day little things, the wear and tear on your body that it creates, that will actually cause you to have to have to have surgery faster than anything else.”
While 84% of veterinary medicine students are now women—McCall hosts six or seven who rotate through for three-week internships most years—many farmers still expect large animal vets to be men.
"I always laugh at the men who are standing there waiting on the guy to come,” says McCall. “What if I said no guy’s going to come? What if I said there aren’t any guys left to come, even if that’s what you wanted, you couldn’t even get that? They don’t know what to say then.”
After giving 36 a shot to help start contractions, McCall clambers back into her pickup truck with Ritchie, where they’ll tabulate the bill, take calls, send texts, and tick off another mile in the 50,000 they’ll travel together this year.
