300 MEN WANTED

Taranaki Daily News, 31 August 1935, Page 18 (Supplement)

300 MEN WANTED

WORK WITH NO UNEMPLOYED. VETERINARY SURGEONS. In these times of stress, when there are still so many workless in our midst, it is refreshing to hear of a great profession which, so far from- being overcrowded, is crying out for young men and women to fill its ranks, says the Children’s newspaper. Veterinary surgery is in this fortunate state. . Ordinary medicine, like all the other professions, is badly overcrowded. There are many doctors, men and women, who find it hard to earn a living by their practice, or even to secure any practice at all. But the 3000 “vets in the United Kingdom are all too few for their work. . . Sir Frederick Hobday, the distinguished Principal of the Royal Veterinary College in Camden Town, where so much splendid work is done in the care cf animals, said recently that the country was crying out for new practitioners. Yet so much prejudice has existed among parents in the past twenty years against sending their sons and daughters into this profession that the demand for qualified veterinary surgeons far exceeds the supply. > Tire Government itself, which has just established a new State Veterinary Service, js in need of 300 qualified men or women at this very moment, and cannot get them. But the facilities for training new practitioners are so limited that Sir Frederick has had to refuse all new applicants who have asked to enter the Royal Veterinary College since the beginning of March. He has 330 students, including 64 young women, and cannot take any more. “There is no unemployment whatever in our profession,” he said, “and there is not likely to be any. The work of the veterinary surgeon is growing day by day, and his triumphs also. “That once universal and fatal disease of animals, distemper in dogs, has been stamped out in this country, owing to the thorough and scientific methods adopted to deal with it. Great progress is also being made in animal surgery, particularly-with dogs—in fact, in every branch of the veterinary surgeon’s calling new discoveries, new cures, new treatments, and new victories for healing are being achieved every day. “No country in the world has ever had as fine a record as ours for kindness to animals, and to-day no country is doing as much for their care and cure."