Veterinarian Job Description

Series Summary

An animal's health is important for it to maintain a good quality of life. However, sometimes it is difficult to tell if a pet is as healthy as it can be. A veterinarian concentrates on animal health, and treats pets, livestock, horses and reptiles. In this free careers video series, a practicing veterinarian describes his job. Learn about a vet's salary, pros and cons and veterinary tools. Find out about options for first jobs out of school, and get tips on how to become a vet. Though being a vet can at times be a stressful, learn how one doctor is fulfilling his childhood dream.

Video Transcript

"A veterinarian is a health care professional who deals primarily with the treatment of animals. A very important part of the job that a lot of people may not be aware of is that we are also part of the health care team that basically educates people as far as aeronautic diseases. Aeronautic diseases are those that are able to be transmitted from animals to people such as fungal infections. Pets have a lot of hook worms, round worms, etc. and those can cause health problems for people especially kids from just skin infection, rashes with the hook worms entering the body through the feet so it is a very important thing to make sure that your pets are always current as far as their vaccines. They should be looked at on a yearly basis if not bi-annually, every six months, to make sure that they are free of external parasites as well as internal parasites. A typical day as a veterinarian begins with just looking at animals. Generally we have hospitalized cases here so I will come in and I will look at all the hospitalized cases, see how their treatment is going, see if they appear to be responding to treatment for those animals that are not eating that is one of the things to check out is to see if they have developed an appetite. We monitor the temperature on them daily and once we are done looking at our hospital cases of those animals that are post surgical such that we are checking to make sure that the incisions are normal, no bleeding, no discharge, the temperatures are normal which would indicate that they are not having any complications post operatively. We will move into the phase of looking at animals that are coming in from day to day for yearly vaccines, etc."