We are fortunate in our area to have a great large animal veterinarian. Not everyone is as lucky. Here are 25 ways to tell if you may be one of the unlucky ones.

1. Nickname is Bones, Buzzard Bill, Dirty Mike or Bad News Betty.
2. Gets queasy and lightheaded at the sight of blood and needles.
3. Vet “truck” is a late model Mercedes sedan or a 1960s VW bus.
4. Wears a neatly pressed white lab coat with his or her name embroidered on it and insists on being referred to as “Doctor.”
5. Has an unlisted phone number and regular office hours.

6. Phone is answered by a foreign-speaking person at an Indian call center or by a computer that asks you to punch #1 for difficult calving, #2 for Bangs vaccinations, #3 for pregnancy checking, et cetera.

7. Won’t come out to the ranch on Sunday when you call because that is her day of rest or on Wednesdays because that’s the day he plays golf with the medical doctors in town.

8. Hedges his bets by also owning a rendering plant, a sausage company or a jerky factory. Is also a taxidermist or leather braider.
9. Reads the labels on vaccine bottles, consults a manual during a C-section and during surgery, recites ... “The thighbone is connected to the knee bone; the knee bone is connected to the ...”

10. The winch on his rig is for pulling calves.
11. Preg-checks a bull or a steer.
12. Calls the bull or steer five months safe in calf.
13. Instead of marking the number of the months pregnant on the rump, he draws smiley faces on every cow that is safe.
14. Has no sense of humor when you inform him that the cattle he’ll be working on that day haven’t quite been gathered yet.
15. Tries to heal your wire-cut horse with spider webs, boar’s teeth, the dried blood of a bat and a poultice made of cow manure.
16. While preg-checking, he keeps going back every 15 minutes to his VW bus or Mercedes sedan for a little nip of “snakebite medicine.”
17. Preferred medical instruments for gelding your horse include a ball-peen hammer and a trusty pocketknife.
18. Gelds the wrong horse ... and sends you a bill for it.
19. Thinks he’s the next Baxter Black and stops working every five minutes to recite one of his original cowboy poems. He bills you for the time – and none of them rhyme.
20. Bills you for such things as dry cleaning, a fuel surcharge, advice, consultation and waiting around. (See #14)
21. You have to show him or her how to operate a squeeze chute or hit a vein.
22. Instead of leaving you with big blue or yellow pills for further treatment, he gives you a rabbit’s foot, a lucky penny and selected Bible passages.
23. Doesn’t want to come out to your place today because he or she just had the rig detailed.
24. While trying to save the best horse you ever owned from a bad case of colic, he continually whistles “Taps.”
25. He or she was last employed as a USDA inspector at a cow plant in Chino, California.