Since fish were just brought up, I was watching some youtube videos of a vet that specializes in treating fish, are specialties like this (or exotic animal treatment) taught during vet school, or are they mostly picked up while working the job?
The basics are taught in vet school, the basics of almost everything is, but if you want to build those skills up you need to follow up with work places with vets who are seeing those species anyway. Itās really hard to build skills with those species if you donāt have access to those kinds of patients and a mentor.
I was a pretty active aquarium keeper through uni and I had a particular interest in ornamental fish, but as much as I was interested in the medicine for ornamental fish, my first job was in a location where I had minimal access to them, and local fish stores donāt actually take kindly to someone walking in as a new vet, introducing yourself and explaining you have an interest in sick fish. Mostly they will say they donāt have sick fish to get you to leave (despite the probably columnaris infection in one tank, but anyway...)
As vets we gain experience with the caseload that we see often. Thatās partly why itās difficult to get into exotic medicine, because as a vet student and newly graduated vet you need to get yourself into clinics that already have that established caseload, and thereās relatively few of them compared to dogs and cats.
It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy when keepers of a particular species decide that āvets donāt know anythingā about that species and so donāt bring them into clinics the skills we had will atrophy and we wont pursue as much continuing education with that species because thereās less demand, and on we go.
I mean, I probably was more confident treating fish, rats, mice and ferrets as a new grad, when the knowledge was fresh, than I am now when I havenāt seen any of those species for at least three years.
