Takeaways from a zoo medicine session

Jb Minter, DVM, MS, DACZM, director of Animal Health at the North Carolina Zoo, will be speaking at our upcoming Fetch conference in Charlotte, North Carolina and told dvm360 in an interview, about what he hopes attendees can learn from his session. He aims at underscoring the similarities between zoo medicine and small- and large-animal medicine so that zoo medicine appears more accessible for any veterinary professional.

Dr Minter will be speaking tomorrow, March 15, at the Fetch Charlotte conference.

Below is a partial transcript.

Jb Minter, DVM, MS, DACZM: I think the biggest thing I want people to take away from this session is that zoo medicine is not that scary. It sounds scary because again, most of you don't learn about a lot of the critters that we have here. And I'm going to use a term zoological medicine in a much broader sense, because people think zoological medicine—to them that's bears and lions and elephants and rhinos. But there are there are going to be patients that people are going to potentially see in private practice. Take fish, for example, take snakes for example, or birds for example, those kind of fit under the umbrella of zoological medicine. So I want people that are in small- and large-animal medicine, not to be fearful of those animals. They are a little bit different, but I think we all have that basic understanding of veterinary medicine, and how veterinary medicine works. We have a basic understanding of just anatomy and physiology.

There are some nuances, and it may take some additional continuing education or a book or some journals to read, but it's still medicine and I think everybody has the skill set to practice for that.