Creating Practice-Ready Small Ruminant and Camelid Veterinarians with Dr. Pippa Gibbons

This month we sat down with Dr. Pippa Gibbons - Assistant Professor of Practice  at Texas Tech University. Dr. Gibbons discusses her background in small ruminant medicine and her work developing a survey to identify common clinical cases and skills needed for new veterinarians, with the goal of creating a “day-one” competency list for sheep and goat practice. This episode highlights how these findings can improve veterinary education, externships, and preparedness for real-world practice, especially in mixed and rural settings. They also emphasize the importance of programs like the AASRP Sam Guss Scholarship in supporting student externships and exposure to small ruminant medicine. 

To learn more about the Sam Guss Memorial Fund or to donate and support future research: https://aasrp.org/Main/Main/About/Sam-Guss-Memorial-Fund.aspx

To find an AASRP member near you, visit the AASRP "Find A Small Ruminant Veterinarian" page: https://www.aasrp.org/Main/Main/About/Find-A-Small-Ruminant-Veterinarian.aspx?hkey=e59ebdd0-6d57-493b-9ae2-e838323b9a38

If your company or organization would like to sponsor an episode or if you have questions about today's show, please email Office@AASRP.org

Transcript

Sarah 0:29

Hello and welcome back to Baas and Bleats our A SRP podcast. I'm super excited'cause A-A-S-R-P, we're gonna have our. First standalone kind of small regional meeting that we've ever offered. And so I don't have a lot of details yet, but if anybody wants to put it on their calendar, it's gonna be August 12th and we're of this year 2026, and we're starting in the, in my area. I live near Buffalo. So the first one is actually gonna be in the Poconos. So we don't have speakers yet or topics, but I wanna get it out there if anybody lives close. Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York. I'm looking at you, Ohio. Yeah, come spend a day with us and, I don't know what we're gonna talk about, but it's gonna be great. And if anybody has something specifically they'd like to talk about we're still working on that. So feel free to reach out to me about that. So today I'm super excited. We're talking to one of Arps longtime friends and supporters Dr. Gibbons. She is an associate professor at Texas Tech University Vet School. And today I think we're gonna be talking about a research grant that you got from A SRP and the product that went with that. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Yeah. So I always love to hear everyone's history and for those of you who don't know Dr. Gibbons, you can tell she's got a little bit of an accent so she can tell us where she's from and where she went to vet school, and also tell us about, I know you've had some leadership roles in A SRP. Tell us what you've done and how you've been associated with the association. Absolutely. So I was raised, born and raised in the UK on the east coast, on a mixed crop, sheep and beef farm. My parents still raised sheep there. But I graduated from the Royal Vet College in 2008 and wanted to specialize in food animal and ultimately moved to do a residency in large animal medicine, which was mostly small ruminant beef cattle at Texas a and m. And I have been in the States ever since at several universities doing both hospital ambulatory and now in my current role, I direct our clinical skills program at Texas Tech. We raise a small number of. County level show goats for my kids that are starting to get into four H. So I still raise some goats. We have the sheet back home that I'm involved in. So as far as SOP before kids, before my second child, I was the A VMA alternate delegate. And I've been involved in various committees. Currently I'm on the Sam Gus Scholarship Committee. Great. Great. Yeah. We'll get back and talk more about Sam Guss probably today. First question, what breed of goats do you have? I have pet Nigerians. We no longer breed those. They're just pets, but they're boar crosses. Meat, goat crosses. Fun, fun. Also, I would, can you give us a little, like, how's it going at Texas Tech? We have so many new vet schools and I think as the vets out there on the field whose students are reaching out to us. We're getting new colleagues from these schools. How's it going? You guys have graduated some classes right? Yes, we graduated our first class in last year and we have full accreditation. So ours is a pretty unique program. Our mission is rural and regional veterinarians, so mixed animal, small and large animal veterinarians that will go into rural and regional, and rural is understandable and regional is metropolitan areas that are outside of the big. Metropolitan areas. So Laredo, El Paso, smaller regional cities like Amarillo and Lubbock Corpus Christi. So that's where we take our students from with an emphasis for them to go back to those areas to practice. So I didn't tell you I was gonna ask you this, I'm sorry, but can you give us an idea of how your curriculum differs from the conventional,'cause they still have to learn dogs and cats, right? They still have to pass the nav. They still have to know all that. Yeah, it is a completely mixed program. We don't do any tracking. Students can choose in their clinical year to focus on an area. So what we are a partially distributive program, so we have a large network of practices, large animals, small animal but all students have to do. Small animal rotations, farm animal food, animal rotations, equine and pathology and diagnostic imaging. And then after that, they can choose to emphasize in mixed animal, rural practice or equine, whatever their interests are. I think the biggest thing. This emphasize in our program is a high level of clinical skills. So we, the students spend six hours in clinical skills every week from day one. And so we, we do a lot of hands-on learning for them to be really competent when they go into clinical year and then go into private practice. That's awesome. The students must love that. Yes. Yeah it's good. It's a lot of work, but yeah, it's an amazing program. Yeah. That's great. And you guys have a hospital? No, we don't. We have an instructional center of excellence for food animal, which is in conjunction with a private practice. And we have some other practices in and around Amarillo where most large majority of our students go, but there's no teaching hospital. Okay. Is that something you guys are wishing for? No, it's not part of our program currently. Okay. Yeah, we're a distributive program. Alright. Wow. That's great. That's exciting. Okay, so today we are going to talk about a survey that Dr. Gibbon and our current a SR President, Mike Dr. Mike Podo did together. This I'm just, I'm not even gonna explain it. I'm gonna let you just jump in and explain kind of your goals and Yeah, what your mission was. Yeah. At the time Dr. Pada was in academia as well. And so part of our goal was to in order to have new graduates that are comfortable and competent in small ruminant medicine is to ultimately develop a day one skill list. So students have a list of skills relevant to small ruminant practice that they can enable to, tailor their learning. So if they're going on an externship in private practice, they know, if I want to do small rooms when I graduate, I should be able to do these things. And in order to build a day, one skills list, you need to know what. Small ruminant practitioners do. And there's quite a lot of data out there in the bovine world because there's a far larger propor proportion of veterinarians that are exclusively bovine, right? So equine, the AA EP has their day one skills list because you can ask a bunch of equine practitioners what they do. The challenge with small remnants is that, that. Most of, there's very few of us that do exclusively small remnant practice. It's usually just a portion of our practice. And so that spans the gamut from urban practices to equine practices, mostly bovine practitioners. And so that's where we started was asking people, so SRP members what they did for small remnants. And we also asked them what were common clinical cases that they saw. And the reason for asking the clinical cases was so that. Mostly from an education aspect. If we are developing curriculum, we can make sure that we are exposing the students to those cases and those diseases, so they're comfortable with that. Where are these comp competencies, like the equine and the bovine ones applied? Like when are the students being asked these, yeah, so the bovine ones I'm part of that group that's developing those. We don't have those yet, but, so I'll talk about ep. So EP publishes these they're on their website for day one graduates in equine practice, and I think they have a year one as well for a year out. And so two ways. One, like when we were building the clinical skills curriculum. At Texas Tech, we looked at those outcomes and said, okay, for an equine practitioner on day one, this is what they needed to be able to achieve. How do we get the students to that competency? For example, they need to be able to pass a NAS gastric tube in a horse. So where do we need to put in teaching opportunities and labs in order for them to be able to do that? And then reversely, students do a lot of externships. And so they can go and say, I want to be able to achieve this because maybe I haven't been able to do this in vet school yet. I haven't had my equine rotations yet. I need to be able to pass a tube, take a shoe off, do these skills. And so part of my research with a different group of folks is looking at externships and we know that. Poor outcomes of externships is when there's mismatched expectations. So students go to a practice and they think they're going to be able to, small room example, precheck a bunch of small remnants. It's not the right time of year, so they don't get it what they want out of it. So if you can go and talk to the practice ahead of time and say. I wanna be able to do X, Y, and Z during this rotation, and the practice says we can't really do that. That's not the time of year we see it. Then, this is my skill list we can take to the practice, and they can talk about what they can achieve. Just the idea behind developing that. Nice. I think, as somebody who is a practice owner. It'd be interesting to have those, not so much as an interview, but definitely the one year out one, just to be like, okay, this is our goal. This is where, as a mentor, it'd be great if you were at this spot. Are the EP ones easy to come by? Can you Google and find them? Yes. That you don't have to be a member of EP to access them. Okay. Interesting. And they, bps aren't out yet, you're working on them. And maybe a, yeah. The way this works is we'll publish this study that we develop these, and then hopefully BP will adopt them. Maybe take that piece out. Okay, great. Yes, I will tell Michelle. Okay. So you and Mike wanted to start the ball rolling with small ruminants. What, how'd you guys do that? What was the plan? Yeah, so we we got the data and we surveyed people and got some answers as to what the common diseases were. Which, it wasn't like super wow, we didn't expect that. We are both small ruminant practitioners, so the top things came out. Yes, we talk to clients a lot about parasite control and general healthcare, and. Certain things are very seasonal. Because of how seasonal lambing and kidding typically is, things seasonally, preg talks, dystocias, things like that. And so it wasn't like world shattering enlightening to us. But that's good from a research perspective, right? What we think, and we know personally is yes, we now have this backed up by a wider group. People and one of the challenging things is, the US is so big and geographically, sheep and goat production is so vastly different, right? Like when I practiced in central Texas, it was all small herds of show medicine, so yes, people would spend a lot of money. That's completely different to somebody in Idaho or even in West Texas, where you're gonna do a lot more herd work and you're never gonna treat. An individual pregnancy toxemia. So we did get some demographic data. We didn't have a big enough response to be able to say, let's pull out, large herd data from people that just see backyard goats. But it gives personally as I was, we were developing the curriculum at tech. I used that data to make sure, okay, we must make sure that we cover ox in small remnants and lysis and things like that. So it was helpful in that sense that we could, this is why we're covering this.'cause I think as we putting on an academic hat and being involved in curricular development, we want an evidence-based background to that, nAV has a practice analysis that covers all species. And when we developed the questionnaire, Mike and I, some of those naly diseases, I was like, do you see this? I've never seen this. It's this wide, so we wanted to make sure, make it pretty practical. And it was just sheep and goats. We didn't cover came lids in that one in our survey. But that's something that's, it's still pretty niche in different areas, yeah, I feel I used to, I don't do this role in A SRP anymore, but I used to be really big in the college liaison stuff and a finding people at every single vet school that's interested in small ruminants is hard. There are vet schools that have nobody, and usually, sometimes you may just beg the bovine person there to be willing to, do a little small ruminant mentoring. I feel like this could be really helpful for those schools. Like you said none of us are small ruminate people. We don't see small ruminates really. But we need, I came out of vet school and I, our small ruminate lectures, we literally had three lectures on emac. Many times I've seen emac like three times. I mean it's just yeah, that's cool.'cause it was really new then I think maybe, or it was just like something they had just started seeing. But I'm like. Nobody talked to us about pre talks or anything important, like menal, worm stuff I see every freaking day a blocked goat. Yeah. And so I feel like something like this could be so helpful. Developing, expanding, improving the curriculum of our vet schools, so our students come out a little bit more prepared. Yeah. And I think the interest really is there in small remnants. Certainly in our program, obviously we have that unique background of the rural regional so many of our students ratio goats or sheep or had pets or some aspects. So I, we just started our small elective for our third year and we have a class of a hundred and I have 26 students in my small room in an elective. Awesome. So that's really good. And I would say about half of them are actually. Equine students because they recognize that, of course people have goats and they really don't they? None of the equine vets where I live will touch a goat. They're all like, no, you need to call Zara, which is fine. I'm happy to see those two little friends of your donkey. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. That's great. Do you wanna go any more specifics or is there, what else can you tell us about the survey in your project and where is it going now? Yeah, so we did present it at a BP conference a couple of years ago. It has not been published further than that. Simply because. We've got a lot going on between both of us. And, the data is out there. And the goal will be potentially to do then something like a Delphi study, which is how EP developed their day one skills list. Bovine is developing their day one skills list. And there were certainly things that we recognized that we didn't ask people. I think we forgot to ask, not forgot, but we didn't ask people euthanasia how many times do euthanize things? We tried to make it super rum, small, ruminant specific. Realistically there are so many things that people do that are generic to all animals. So that needs to be asked in a wide, a wider general practice to get those. There is a study out of the UK that looked at farm animal included sheep and cattle. So we have that comparative data from the uk, which is, depending on what region the in is very similar or could be very different as to how put raised in the uk interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's, I think it's good work, but yeah. Mike has stopped being in academia and now has his own practice. Yeah. Super busy like we all are. Of course. Yeah. Yeah, this is super, it's super interesting. I, it. We were talking before we started recording how, just as vets out in, alumni of the vet schools, basically just being very conscious, conscientious of what's coming in our industry. I think this is all very interesting to us. At least for me, like I love hearing what's going on in the vet schools how they're teaching small ruminants, what the students are interested in. And I think at conferences we're definitely realizing, as a SRP leadership, we realize we need to offer. Small ruminant medicine 1 0 1 all the time. Like almost every meeting we present or we put on talks, there are people who want those introductory, I'm a horse vet, I see a few goats. Just give me the basics kind of stuff and if I find anything hard, I'll send it to you people, which, and so I think this is huge. I think this is a great place for us to also. Talk about Sam Gus a little bit. Do you, I know you've done more on the Sam Gus side of a SRP than me. Do you just wanna give our listeners a little bit of refresher on what Sam Guss offers and what it's there for? Yeah, so Sam Gus is an externship scholarship opportunity for students. So we recognize that students might not be exposed to small remnants. In practices or in that clinical year. And it's expensive for students to do externships. Like some students will spend up to$2,000 to fly and rent an Airbnb in order to get some really good exposure. And again, it's tricky because it's so seasonal for small ruminants that, you can't guarantee they'll be on a small ruminant rot food animal rotation. In clinical year, in the spring, for example, they might not all get that opportunity. So being able to go and do an externship at a practice that does a lot of small remnants is really key. So Sam Gus is a scholarship for externship specific, and the students apply any year can apply. Typically it's those in their second, third, and fourth year with an interest. They have to be members of SRP. And then they have to write an externship report. And that typically gets published in wool and Wattles, right? And Sam Gus is primarily financed by people's donations. We try to do some fundraisers. We've done the open mic night at BP a few times. We also A SRP has a new committee. I call the fundraising committee, but that's not what it's called. And they're gonna be, working on ways to expand Sam Gus and let us be able to offer more money and and help more students get some small ruminant experience. I think they're gonna be, reaching out to industry and and trying to widen our net a little bit. And I think, so there's so many things that externships. Can offer that. So the reason I'm in the States is because when I was a third year vet student, I did an externship at a bovine practice in rural Kansas and fell in love with bovine practice in the states. And so had I never had that opportunity, I probably wouldn't be working in the States and met my husband and have American kids, they really can open doors. For students and give them both from the practice, like this is a student we want to employ as a new grad. And so it's a really good opportunity for recruitment.'Cause if you work with a person for two weeks or a month, that's a lot longer than you would get in a interview. Yeah. And it doesn't have to be a lot of money. Even if it's just I need gas money to go. To the next state over, that's fine. Whatever they need, apply for it. But yeah, a lot of times it's a plane ticket and just that extra support that students typically don't have that extra money. It's a good thing. It's one of my favorite things we do in A SRP and I, I. I talk to students like I give talks and I tell them, there are years that we have way more money than we have people apply. That's not always true. Sometimes by the end of the year we have to tell people no, because we do run outta money. But it goes on a case by case basis. How much, and this would be another really great place for for the results of your study because then, I feel like as practitioners, if we had this list in front of us, and like you said, some stuff is seasonal and like I can't make. Animals have certain diseases while you're here. It would be nice if it was like, you need to be able to put in an IV catheter and, if you had this skills list when you had these students and a lot of us own our own goats and if you're like, okay, you need to learn how to do this, I won't trim their feet before you come. I won't, I'll save some things that I would normally do, vaccines or whatever, and just help the students work down this list. I would love that. That would be awesome. I would trimmed my own goats in years because students do them. Yeah. It's a good, I have a couple, I have a couple rescues that love it when I have students because I'm like, I'm gonna come for free and bring this student. We're gonna do all this stuff. And they're like, okay. Yeah. And so yeah, if we have downtime or if we're in the, the area of those rescues I try to take the students there just'cause I have three goats and they have a lot more than that. Yeah. And my daughter's very protective of her goats. She doesn't want anyone just messing around with'em, so it's a thing. What else? I'm just trying to think if there's something else. Was there anything from the survey you were surprised by? I know you said you and Mike, work in this field, so a lot of it you were like, yeah, we know that. Was there anything that you were a little taken back by? I don't think so. I guess the one thing we didn't expect to be seasonal was health certificates and we were like, huh, interesting. That came out. But then thinking back, probably it's because if a lot of people do four H goats and the major shows, that's when they're gonna be writing health certificates. And that's changed. In Texas, the rules around writing health certificates for majors have changed a little bit yeah, thing. Things change like that. As policy changes be expected to do, to be, to do different things and I think, it's a practice is ever shifting as, for example, pre checking. There was a time when I did a ton of pre checking where now a lot more people can have access to ultrasounds and want to learn to do it themselves. You are wrongly, it takes, actually, it's a huge skill to be able to precheck via ultrasound. So yeah, practice will shift and change and expectations of a small ruminant practitioner will change as. The economy changes in the industry. Yeah. That stuff you just don't see coming. Like I used to do so many camlet teeth like the incisors and work, and I haven't done it in years. I think all of the, people trimming them are doing it now. And yeah, I do way less small rum minute park checking. Same people are using blood tests and urine tests and stuff like that and yeah. That's a good point. And it's sad. I loved doing alpaca teeth. It was like one of my favorite things. Yeah. When I first graduated, the al the Camelo market was crazy expensive. We would treat Koreas like fos and run plasma to everything. Certainly in Texas, that's not very common anymore. No. Here either. No. I haven't done a plasma test on an alpa on a came lid in years. Years, yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah, so maybe even those skillset lists that we come out with, maybe those are a little bit fluid also, not necessarily static, at least if you have the list, for your area, you can. But it's not the Bible. You can change it. Yeah. You can be like, or just gives a, it gives a good starting point. Yeah. C-sections, one of the things I do is I'm on a lot of Facebook groups of that Tibet Facebook groups and we appreciate you on those when I have time. But then those are the same questions come up, how do I castrate, how do I do a c-section? And we've got a c sheep, C-section model at tech that all of our students do. It's pretty cool. We have a 3D, it was a 3D printed, now it's a molded silicone lamb that goes in a fake uterus in a barrel. And so they go through the steps of it and it's not identical, but they do all the steps. They know the steps of it. It's just dry. There's no blood and no goo. Yeah. At least they can know how to. Do the steps of a C-section, which is hugely valuable'cause that's not something I was ever exposed to in vet school. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like most of my small ous skills was because I started as a dairy vet dabbling in small animal, and once you can, you learn a lot. That's where you learn to ultrasound and do C-sections and then you just tailor them to sheep and goats. But if you came out and were doing mixed practice. Just dabbling in small roommates, it'd be really hard to get those skills, like just to do enough of them to feel confident, yeah. Yeah. And on an externship, you'll be lucky if you see a c-section unless you go somewhere where they're like, lambing or kidding out a hundred a day or something. Yeah. And that's a big difference between the UK and still in the uk. All vet students are required to do at least two weeks laming experience and so she flocks in the UK rely on vet students as mostly free labor to lamb and as a That's amazing though. She promised daughter I got paid for doing it and'cause I could already pull a lamb and revive one. But yeah, we work long hours for. The Easter holidays because that's where most people land. And it's a fantastic opportunity, so that is awesome. The idea is to learn the industry, obviously. Yeah, for sure. Alright, what else? What else? Anything else from the survey? I don't. I think that's pretty much most of it, the key things. Unless there's anything that you thought was really interesting to you. Yeah, no, it's hard for us because it's so every day, for us, and it would probably be more interesting for students to hear more facts, but yeah. So you and Mike need to get it published. That's the next step, and I know that takes forever. Yeah. So as you probably read on my little script here, I always like to talk to people about our final question. What do you like, what do you see is the let me just read it. What do you see as the next problem that researchers need to think about and address in small ruminant medicine? What are we. What are, what's the big ticket for you that you feel like needs to go next? Most of my research is either veterinary education or small ruminant, and I think, if we compare it to cattle more pharmacology, but on a clinical trial basis. So we use a lot of cattle drugs off label. We know the pharmacokinetics withdrawal time, the safety. We don't have a huge amount of data on efficacy of drugs for respiratory disease. Some of the things. I'm still working on looking at ultrasound and diagnosing respiratory disease.'cause we know we're really bad at listening to sheep and goat lungs and diagnosing it. And all that ends up doing is we overuse antimicrobials. So I, parasites are well covered. We're deep into sustainable parasite control, but I think there's a huge opportunity for antimicrobial usage in small ruminants as well. In the future for sure. I had a producer who breeds a decent amount of sheep's sheep this week reach out to me and be like, what do you think of the new trend of people giving exceed to every single lamb being born? I'm like, that's a new trend. Interesting. No, that's, let's not do that. Please. Because, yeah. Wow. Really? Why? Why are we doing that? I'm just like, oh my goodness. Yeah. Hi. So yes, that's a great one, right? If we had very specific things, yeah. I'm sure you have the same conversations. I do. Can we give my small rumen an antibiotic? I don't know. Does it have a temperature? Is it off feed? Is it doing more than coughing twice? Yeah. I talked to my students yesterday. We were talking about respiratory disease, and I said, goods, cough, and it's not always pneumonia. There are lots of other reasons, but Right. Don't miss the pneumonia, just don't go throwing antibiotics at it. Yeah. And I like, I feel bad saying it, but I'm so glad that we took antibiotics off the shelf and I'm getting to the point where there's very few people I trust to have a bottle of antibiotics on their farm. I just, I, it's, yeah, it's scary. It's scary. Anyway, we just drifted way off topic, but it was super good to talk to you. And I'm excited about everything you guys are doing down in Texas Tech. It's great to hear that the new vet schools are doing well and I hope, I think the COVID curve is, we're on the down downside. I don't think, we're feeling like we have a massive vet shortage anymore, and I know we got a bunch of new vets schools, so they like stepped in to try to fill the need. I hope we don't swing too far the other way where there's too many and nobody gets paid anything. But yeah, I'm super appreciative of what you guys are doing and that you're putting out large animal student vets for to fill the void. And to small ruminant people to become mixed animal. That's basically yeah. Anything else you'd like to add? I don't think so. Thank you for having me on today. Yeah. Alright, we're gonna say goodbye and hopefully we won't miss any more months and BOS and Bleed will be back. All right, thanks guys.