The Future of Bovine Practice

Abstract

A point at which I know we will find agreement is an intense interest in, even affection for, bovine practice. And, I am very much concerned right now with the need to deal adequately with its future.

You have all come to this meeting at some inconvenience and at some cost. I have come a very great distance, at no little inconvenience it is true, but particularly at a considerable expense to your Association.

These are material matters perhaps, but they do require a dividend in return for the investment.

There are emotive aspects too. Some of you, especially the younger ones, are concerned as to what form bovine practice will take in the future; whether or not major changes will occur. And at least one of you must be thinking that or we would not be here discussing the subject today.

Someone is nervous about the future. I admit I have been. But not any more.

And that, I suppose, is why I accepted your invitation to talk to you.

And to justify my confidence in the future I have to explain two things.

The first is that I am a "future watcher" on behalf of the students I teach. I take the matter very seriously and for the 30 years during which I have been a teacher I have been most concerned with teaching my students what they needed to know about cattle and the cattle industry, and what the cattle industry needed to have them know.

And the only way to do that was to work almost full-time as a clinician in the cattle industry and to continuously predict the future.

The second explanation is historical and I refer to the developments in the cattle industry and in bovine practice in our lifetimes. I identify four stages and these may have occurred at different times in our respective countries but I think they occurred.