Careers in Agriculture: Love of working with animals develops into veterinarian career

POLO, Ill. — Working as a veterinarian means every day is different — and that’s what Taryn Pfeiffer really enjoys about her career.

Pfeiffer started working with animals at a young age.

“My dad had a farrow-to-finish hog operation and I was always with him,” she said. “My mom says I told her I wanted to be a veterinarian when I was 5 years old.”

In 2011, Pfeiffer graduated with a bachelor’s degree in animal science from the University of Illinois and four years later completed her degree from the U of I College of Veterinary Medicine.

“I spent time on the meats judging team with Dr. Carr and that was the best thing I’ve done,” she said. “In September of my fourth year of vet school, Dr. Baker offered me a position and said, ‘I hope you come to work for me.’”

Next year will mark Pfeiffer’s 10th year at Polo Animal Hospital.

“It’s a rarity that people stay at the same clinic forever, but I hope I do,” she said. “Dr. Baker has been a wonderful mentor, he’s a great cattle vet and I’ve learned a lot from him.”

During the first calving season working at Polo, Pfeiffer asked to work together with Baker.

“I pulled one set of twins in front of him and he said, ‘You are fine,’” she recalled. “I never pulled another calf with him, but I’ve called him a few times.”

Pfeiffer does large animal work on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, works half a day at the clinic on Tuesday and does surgeries for small animals at the clinic on Thursday.

“If you don’t use your surgical skills, you lose them,” she said. “It is helpful for me to do surgeries once a week for the tissue and instrument handling.”

As a result, the veterinarian is prepared when a C-section is required on a large animal.

“I don’t think I would be as comfortable if I didn’t keep up my small animal surgery skills,” she said. “Surgery is surgery — if you can do surgery on a dog, you can do surgery on pigs.”

Pfeiffer’s clients are split about 50-50 between hog and cattle operations.

“I like both equally well, but they are different types of work,” she said. “The cattle are privately owned so the owners are invested, but a lot of the hogs are owned by larger corporations so I do more teaching with the workers.”

The veterinarian also works with two dairy farms.

“I’ve done herd checks for one of the dairies since 2019,” she said. “I do a lot of early preg checks with ultrasound for the dairy operations.”

With ultrasound, Pfeiffer can do a full confirmation that a female is pregnant at 30 days.

“You can do a blood test as early as 20 days, but it is not always reliable,” she said. “With ultrasound, I can check the heart and make sure everything looks appropriate and healthy.”

One of the veterinarian’s favorite parts of her job is that she is responsible for determining her schedule.

“My clients call me directly and it takes some experience to know how long a job will take,” she said. “I hate keeping people waiting, but sometimes it happens if something goes wrong.”

Juggling the responsibilities of working as a veterinarian as well as being a wife and mom is a challenge, Pfeiffer said.

“You need to be organized, time-focused and able to multitask,” she said. “That’s probably the hardest part, but it goes in phases and right now we don’t have many emergences.”

The busiest time for Pfeiffer is calving season from December through May when she gets lots of emergency calls.

“This year, I pulled six calves in June so it was a long season,” Pfeiffer said.

“The biggest challenge facing large animal veterinarians is there is not enough of us,” she said. “We’re trying to do anything to entice young vets to get into large animal work or to stay in it.”

Research by Iowa State University reported that veterinarians don’t stick with the large animal work due to the impact on family time, emergency calls and the extra driving time to get from farm to farm, Pfeiffer said.

“Small animal work is so much more profitable because they can work less hours for more money so you really have to love working with large animals,” she said.

Pfeiffer often has veterinarian students assisting her with procedures.

“We have a student at least through the summer and students that come for externships in two-week blocks,” Pfeiffer said. “I always try to be conscious of safety and where they are at because I obviously don’t want anyone hurt.

“Dr. Baker was always huge on that, not putting yourself in a bad position,” she said. “I tell the kids to always have an escape route.”

In addition to working as a veterinarian, Pfeiffer and her husband, Adam Almburg, own a 30-cow herd.

“We built this from a couple of show heifers and they are mostly purebred Maine-Anjou,” Pfeiffer said.

“Some of them are embryo calves and now I’m starting to do embryo implants,” she said. “Our cattle have genetics that will grow and perform and do what they need in the feedlot, not just in the show ring.”

The cattlemen sell both breeding stock and feeder calves from their herd and oftentimes their cattle are purchased by Pfeiffer’s clients.

“We sold a bull and we still had the rights to the genetics so we had him collected,” she said. “Then we bought a heifer back from the cattleman who bought our bull so that was full circle for us.”