Kentucky has 15 practicing veterinarians over age 85. Here’s why some are still working

Dr. Gary Tran read through a chart numbered 95,195, as Atlas’ ears perked up in attention from the examination table.

Maybe once he filled out the 100,000th chart he’d retire, he mused.

Maybe.

Retirement isn’t something the 85-year-old veterinarian thinks much about since his wife died last year. Tran has been caring for animals in the dead of night at the Animal Emergency Center in Louisville for nearly 40 years, and he doesn’t see a reason to quit now. Sure, he can’t stay on his feet as long as he once did, but he still has his strength. His eyes are still good. His mind is still sharp.

“I’ve got guys like him, that want me to keep on working as long as I can, so why not?” he said, as he drew blood from the dog for a routine heartworm check.

The answer is more complex than that routine test he’d just given Atlas. Tran knew of two other elderly veterinarians who haven’t been able to sell their practices, so he doesn’t entertain any hope that he will successfully sell his, either. For the past decade or so, the country has faced an increasing veterinarian shortage, and for Tran, that means there are fewer doctors around eager to buy in or take over.

The shortage can delay care for thousands of pets in Kentucky, puts our food supply at risk, and, inadvertently, can postpone retirement for veterinarians like Tran.

There are 15 licensed vets in the Bluegrass State over the age of 85, and three of them are in their 90s. These are doctors who worked in the profession in its perceived glory days and have stayed with it as the shortage ballooned to plague more than 72% of rural Kentucky.

With a little help from the Kentucky Department of Agriculture, The Courier Journal sent letters to the 15 oldest vets in the state to hear their stories.

Three of them responded.

In talking with Tran, along with Dr. Luel Overstreet in Henderson and Dr. Robert McCrory in Benton, a few things became exceedingly clear.

They all had similar ideas of what caused the nationwide veterinarian shortage, but each doctor had a different reason to avoid hanging up his stethoscope for good.

While practicing veterinary medicine in the twilight of their lives looks different for all three of them, there’s a clear, dynamic, old-school work ethic that’s pushed all of them to keep at it.

They’re not eager to fully retire, and likely never will.

The Problem: Where did all the veterinarians go? Shortage across Kentucky impacts pet owners, farmers

The Solution: ‘Facing the challenge head-on’: How Kentucky is trying to solve its veterinarian shortage

Running a clinic in a way that makes sense at 93

Three hours and 200 miles separate Tran’s emergency clinic in Louisville from a handwritten note taped to the front door at Marshall County Veterinary Clinic.

“Please Ring Bell,” it says. “Mrs. McCrory will come to the door.”

She’s not the doctor, but she’s the main reason her husband is still practicing at 93.

Mrs. McCrory doesn’t like to stay at home during the day, Dr. Robert McCrory explained kindly, so each morning they get up and come to the office where the geraniums she’s tended for the past 30 years stand nearly as tall as the doctor and his wife.

His retirement will depend on “whoever dies first,” the Benton-based vet explained with a blatantly honest laugh.

“If I die first, she doesn’t have a license,” he said. “If she dies first, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

At his age, he doesn’t do surgery or set bones anymore, but he can still give injections and sell flea medicine. The pills run about $30 a piece, and he knows many of the pet owners in his community live paycheck to paycheck. Some can’t afford six pills at once.

So the McCrorys keep running the clinic in a way that makes sense for them and their community. In recent years, the practice has become more of a social outlet for the couple than anything else.

That’s not the case 100 miles to the northeast. Overstreet is about eight years younger than McCrory, and he still performs surgeries most mornings at the clinic he once owned in Henderson.

He kept his practice afloat in rural Kentucky for more than four decades before he sold it off to another vet, who once trained under him. Overstreet has no intention of retiring from veterinary medicine, but coyly he admits that doesn’t mean he won’t get fired.

Working as a vet isn’t just a career to him at this point. He’s been treating animals and helping pet owners in Henderson, in some cases, for four generations. Caring for animals in his community, at times, has almost been a service.

There were times he wasn’t sure he’d have enough money to put gas in the tank. Even so, he is the type of vet who has always put the care of others and their needs above his own.

“I have never turned anybody away because he didn’t have money to pay,” Overstreet said. “I have never told anybody I was too busy to see them. If they’d wait, I’d see them.”

The logic behind it, he says, is simple.

“I never had any money, so money was never a big deal to me,” he said, gesturing to a picture of a rural shack in Marion County where he grew up. “I have never made very much money practicing vet medicine. I’ve made a living, but I’ve never made much money.”

‘You didn’t think anything of it’

Being a vet certainly isn’t a glamorous profession; all three doctors made that abundantly clear. The payoff never quite matched the hours they spent working or the schooling needed to become a veterinarian.

“If you work in a veterinary office, you love the profession,” Tran said. “You’re not afraid of the blood and the feces or getting bitten by a dog or scratched by a cat.”

As society has shifted, up-and-coming vets don’t keep hours like McCrory, Tran, Overstreet and their classmates did in the mid-20th century. The schedule is one of the biggest changes they’ve seen in the modern generation of veterinarians.

After McCrory graduated from Auburn University, he worked long days for minimal pay. There were times he’d travel 20 miles to deliver a calf for $6. He worked from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday to Saturday, and then split shifts on Sundays.

“Back then, you didn’t think anything of it because farmers work from daylight to dark,” he said.

And it’s not just the hours that have changed. The cost of veterinary medicine has changed, too.

McCrory smiled and recalled a lesson from his mentor early in his career on knowing what to charge for helping an animal. You had to be extremely perceptive, but McCrory said it was less about the animal and more about what you spotted in the parking lot.

If a woman drove up in a Cadillac, she got the full $25 fee.

If it was a World War I veteran with an almost dead dog in a broken-down truck, they never charged more than a dollar or two.

Sliding payment scales certainly aren’t unheard of today, but typically there’s more paperwork involved.

And really, there has to be.

One of the major differences between modern young veterinarians and what these doctors experienced has to do with their circumstances when they came out of college.

Vets today often have a mound of debt to pay off while they’re starting their careers. The average student debt for all veterinary medicine graduates was $147,258 in 2022, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association. Tran, Overstreet and McCrory all graduated and started their careers decades ago debt-free.

Overstreet doesn’t recall just how much it cost for him to attend Auburn University in the 1960s, but in between semesters, he was able to make enough money to pay for his schooling by working in tobacco fields, baling hay and raising cattle.

The most dedicated veterinary student wouldn’t be able to pay tuition off doing those same jobs today.

But even though the cost of their education was more manageable, all three of them sought other ways, beyond caring for animals, to bring money into their households.

McCrory raised sheep, briefly, and spent some time working as a vet for the Air Force during the Korean War. Overstreet also owns a farm, and made a name for himself in the horse racing world. The Henderson veterinarian raised 1,000 or so racehorses, including three world champion harness horses and one Breeders Crown winner.

Tran, who immigrated to the United States during the Vietnam War, and his wife lived in a small house and raised five children. She didn’t speak much English, but she worked in a factory and a restaurant to help make ends meet. Eventually, Tran teamed up with a group of veterinarians to form an emergency clinic in Louisville, and then he took over that practice in 1985. Later, he and his wife opened the Kumon Math and Reading Center on North Hubbards Lane.

Part of the reason they took on the tutoring center was Tran sensed children needed more help with their studies than public education could provide. The public education programs here, he says, aren’t as strong as the ones he knew in Vietnam.

And he emphasized hard work and education. After watching the hours their father kept at the emergency clinic, none of his children had any interest in studying veterinary medicine.

Instead, all five became engineers.

‘Dogs nowadays, they’re substitute children’

However, the shifts in society these veterinarians have seen go well beyond paychecks and tuition.

Since McCrory graduated from Auburn in 1955, veterinary science has stamped out hog cholera and brucellosis. They haven’t eliminated rabies entirely, but in the early 1900s, more than 100 people died from it per year in the United States. Now, it’s less than a handful.

Medicine has changed a lot over the years, for both humans and animals.

All three doctors pointed to a societal shift in the workforce during the second half of the 20th century as part of the reason for the veterinary shortage. Between 1968-78, the number of families in which only the husband worked declined by about 4.1 million, and dual-earner families rose by about 4.5 million, or nearly 25%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

When both parents had careers, the generation of veterinarians that came after them was less likely to work the long hours and weekends they needed to work early in their careers. While the vet shortage didn’t truly start causing problems then, they all felt a shift in the industry as early as the 1990s.

The other major variable McCrory and Overstreet see has to do with the type of animal veterinarians treat.

Large-animal care always supplemented small-animal care back in the day, McCrory said, and that’s not necessarily the case anymore. Overstreet reckons for a while he and his partner had one of the largest beef cattle vet practices in the state, but as farming has shifted from cattle to soybeans and corn, so has his patient load.

Over time, the care demand for small animals like dogs and cats grew.

“Veterinary medicine is based on the value of the animal that you’re treating,” McCrory says. “Dogs nowadays, they’re substitute children, and there is no limit to what they’ll spend on them. We’ve got animals that are part of people’s families.”

And when people consider animals part of the family, that means, in some cases, the family vet is as important as the family doctor.

‘I cannot sell it, and nobody wants it’

Alex Laustere doesn’t like to think about what might happen to his dogs if Tran ever retires.

“We want to keep Dr. Tran around forever,” Laustere said.

When he recently led his dog, Athena, into the overnight clinic in Louisville, he passed a bag full of pork liver across the front counter for Tran to take home later. He and his wife usually buy a whole hog from their local butcher, so there’s plenty to share with their favorite vet.

“He takes care of us, so we try to take care of him,” Laustere said.

Back in the examination room, Athena shook nervously on the table, but Laustere insisted she would have been even more uneasy at any other clinic. Some evenings, Tran treats only a few dogs, so the quiet nature of the clinic helps keep Athena calm. Tran also allows Laustere to accompany her into the exam room, which he says hasn’t always been the case with other vets they’ve seen.

Laustere is among the 5,000 or so pet owners Tran has worked with since he bought the practice in 1985. Being a night vet doesn’t always mean you’re helping dogs who ate a whole box of chocolates at 2:30 a.m. Intermingled with the animals that come to him in emergency situations are also regular clients who appreciate his focus on holistic medicine or whose own work schedules don’t match up with the typical veterinarian hours.

That’s another shift Tran has seen during his career. In the 1980s, he was really the only vet open in the dead of night, and daytime clinics would route calls to him with late-night emergencies. That’s not the case, now. Pet owners in Louisville have a handful of other emergency vets to choose from.

At this point, Tran would sell his practice if he could, but the right opportunity hasn’t come up yet. That likely has to do with the veterinary shortage, too. He suspects the upcoming generation of vets doesn’t want to work the late, long hours to which Tran has become accustomed.

“I cannot sell it, nobody wants it, and I can’t hire anyone,” he explained.

So, while he still has about 4,800 or so charts to go before he hits that 100,000th, there’s a not-so-subtle sign that he’s already looking ahead. When dogs walk into his clinic, now, they’re stepping on brand-new floors. On the night The Courier Journal visited, power tools were just barely audible over Athena and Atlas’ subtle barks. The transition was evident between the modern new flooring and the aging cabinets that looked as though they’d been around the night clinic as long as Tran.

While Laustere and Athena would like to keep Tran around “forever,” he will eventually have to sell.

And at the very least, if he can’t sell his practice, perhaps he can sell the building. Maybe a medical doctor would want it. Maybe it could be an office.

Either way, he wants to recoup something from everything he’s invested. Having watched other veterinarians struggle to sell, he’s got to figure out something.

So at 85 years old, he’s got as long as his eyes are still good and his mind is still sharp to find a buyer.

Or maybe, until he fills out that 100,000th chart.

Features columnist Maggie Menderski writes about what makes Louisville, Southern Indiana and Kentucky unique, wonderful, and occasionally, a little weird. If you’ve got something in your family, your town or even your closet that fits that description — she wants to hear from you. Say hello at [email protected]. Follow along on Instagram and Twitter @MaggieMenderski.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Vet shortage in Kentucky: Eldest professionals feel need to work