Staff Writer
HOULTON — Attention future doctors of veterinary medicine — Aroostook County and Houlton want you! Recently, the call has gone out from local vets encouraging other animal doctors to come and set up office throughout the county. The demand and the lack of time is beginning to take its toll on the current veterinarians serving the area’s pets in need, and some of those doctors feel a crisis is coming.
“It’s not easy to attract people to this area,” explained veterinarian Dr. Laurel Pinales. “In a small town, you have emergencies to cover, which sometimes interfere with the amount of sleep you need. We would like to find somebody to come and relieve and take some of the pressure off.”
Pinales, who owns and operates the Animal Hospital of Houlton, admits that she hasn’t made enough effort in engaging the interests of students and graduates because she simply hasn’t had the time. That is something she’s going to begin working on starting now.
“We’ve called a couple of schools, but we really haven’t done a lot,” she said. “One problem that we’ve run into is when you’re young and you have student loans, you absolutely have to make money to pay them off, which means you need to be making a fair amount of money. The other problem that we sometimes have is that if you have two people that come up here, his or her spouse will need a job.
“That sometimes is hard to deal with,” she added.
Pinales herself migrated to the Shiretown only 10 years ago with her husband Sylvio Raymond who is a native. The two had lived in Michigan.
“My husband is from here and his parents were ill and he felt that he wanted to be up here during their final years,” she explained. “We were also tired of the urban rat race so we moved up here.”
Pinales said the hectic pace has caught up with them. Today, her job has become so demanding that she almost finds it impossible to plan vacations or seminars.
“We do as much as we can,” she said. “It’s very difficult to go on vacation. It was not possible for me to find a replacement for even three weeks. It makes it difficult to really take time off and that adds to the stress.”
Another stress for any vet is the loss of their patients. But it’s the love of their patients that make them so valuable to the community.
“Dogs and cats have a shorter lifespan than humans, so you’re always dealing with death and their owners who are upset at having to put their pets to sleep so I think that’s the hardest thing,” she said.
Besides Pinales’ office (532-4800), there is also the Aroostook Veterinary Services in Houlton (532-4081) and the office of Dr. Ray Newman in Island Falls (463-2204).
Dr. Pinales encourages current and future animal doctors to contact one of these offices, or other veterinary offices in the county if they’re interested in practicing in Aroostook County.
