Dog vets vs. Cow vets
My buddies and I were at Cuzzy’s last Friday - packed all the time, if you get a table you hold onto it for dear life, full of drunks, everyone is vaguely 24 years old, where taped-up dollar bills paper the walls with such density that a sufficiently kleptomaniacal patron could pay for their drinks all night with enough furtive tearing-offs of dirty marked-up scotchtape dollar bill after dollar bill.
We got a table; immediately after sitting down, my friend knocked his 90% full beer on its head and covered himself in Flat Tire; normal Friday night activities.
Soon enough three women sit down next to us. Vet students, all of them:
Red: A girl all made-up, wearing a glossy red jacket, with perfectly-curled hair, as if she had gone to the hair stylist at 10pm on Friday and then straight to the dirtiest bar in the North Loop.
Quiet: A brown-haired girl in a black leather jacket, whose interaction with us amounted to nodding when her friends said something, widening her eyes when any of us guys said anything, and wearing a smile that managed to be constantly mischievous and shy at once. Did I ever hear her speak?
Blonde: The most talkative, sitting nearest me, with a strong voice for a woman - the easiest to imagine cornering a desperate housecat in her office fleeing the antibiotic needle, holding it down and injecting it without remorse as it mrRRrreeoowwed.
So I learn they are vet students and in fact an ex-girlfriend of mine was a vet student from Indiana - specializing in cows, big cow fan, herself - and I tell them this and all three go OHHHHHH.
This is a thing.
It turns out when you are a vet student you either care about being a little cute pet vet - dogs, cats - or a big livestock farm vet - cows, horses, pigs. But the early years of vet school do not recognize this, and stick them all together. And these groups interact like cats cows and dogs.
These women hated my ex-girlfriend the moment they heard about her! I asked Red to get more detailed - what is wrong with cow vets? What is the issue here?
I would never talk badly about another woman, she says. At the end of the day even with our differences we are still all women and I would not spread rumors about other women.
(All vet students are women)
I nod sagely and say that is something I can respect and understand. She nods, satisfied. I turn to the other two: But you guys will tell me, right?
And Blonde does. Vicious stereotypes! Slanderous accusations! All cow vets are married at 20! Cow vets raise their hands in the middle of a class clearly about dogs and ask “But how does this apply to cows”, again and again! All cow vet students have drank milk directly from the teat of a cow!
(after each of these scurrilous claims, Quiet is alternately widening and unwidening her eyes and nodding, standing in the back in her motorcycle jacket. Red is burying her face in her hands in a way that somehow expresses deep and forbidden agreement)
When Blonde has finished with the last of these malevolent aspersions, I try to get to the bottom of this: what is the deal? What’s the issue? They in their own minds are not quite sure but I ask and I ask and I get to the bottom of it.
Think about it: a dog vet, to have a successful practice, needs to live in dense urban environments, where there are customers with their little dogs all around, bringing them in for the various acute issues that arise from being a 15-years-at-best-lifespan canine that enjoys eating trash and feces. The city.
A cow vet, on the other hand - her customers are all farmers raising livestock. She drives from farm to farm to check if the animals are healthy enough, do any of them have diseases that will spread to the herd, if this one has a limp is that OK or should we shoot it in the head, oops all our pigs caught the flu what do we do now, driving hours a day between different far-flung farms. The country.
This especially explains “All cow vets are married at 20!” - a classic city-country difference. (City couples consider it a sacred duty to marry at 35, as they value the excitement of trying to conceive a child far past the ideal fertility windows).
So at the end of the day it turns out city people like to talk shit about country people and vice versa. Of course they do! But I am charmed at how unique and specific this manifestation of the old urban-rural divide was. Try to talk to me about Democrat vs. Republican at a bar and I’ll go jump into the Mississippi. But dogs vets vs. cow vets? Hell yeah.