North Texas pets enjoy surprisingly broad choices when it comes to health care: plenty of general veterinarians and those offering myriad specialty services, including pet dentistry, ophthalmology and dermatology.

This is a good thing for our urban and suburban animal friends. But farm animals in rural parts of Texas do not have access to the same level of care. Texas lacks enough large-animal veterinarians for our dairy and meat animals. And that, despite the fact that Texas A&M runs an excellent veterinarian school.

The Texas Legislature has kicked this issue down the road for decades, slow to take action on the demand for rural veterinarians and the right programs to address it. This session, Texas Tech University System is offering a proposal to solve this problem by building a veterinary school at the health sciences center in Amarillo. We think lawmakers should give the university a chance to do so.

We say this with understanding that Texas A&M recently broke ground on an exciting veterinary program at West Texas A&M down the road in Canyon to allow students to focus on rural, large-animal or food animal veterinary medicine.

But there’s a larger issue here beyond Tech vs. A&M: Investing in West Texas. We city folk often forget how greatly we rely on that vast rural region of the state for food, fuel, cotton and more. It’s important to support local institutions, particularly when people in the region have shown enthusiasm for a project with their own donations.

Tech has raised $90 million to build the school and has asked the Legislature for $17 million for the biennium to pay for operations to support an initial class size of 40 students, including students who might choose to focus on pets rather than large or food animals.

A&M has a lower-cost proposal, asking the Legislature for $8.1 million for the biennium to fund a West Texas A&M rural veterinary medicine program that is graduating about 8 to 10 students a year focused specifically on food production medicine. A&M has already invested $90 million in the Panhandle for veterinary medicine.

Are eight to 10 new agricultural veterinarians each year enough?

A&M says yes. “We intend to graduate as many as Texas needs,” A&M dean of veterinary medicine Eleanor Green told us. And the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board agrees, saying Texas needs rural veterinarians, but not a new veterinary school.

But Texas Tech says that’s not enough new agriculture veterinarians, and federal data suggests we need more. The U.S. Department of Agriculture operates a grant program that addresses what it terms Veterinary Services Shortage Situations. This program repays educational loans for veterinarians who agree to serve in rural locations and in capacities the department determines are in troubling and persistent shortage. In 2018, the department designated shortages in 40 states, with eight jobs in Texas identified for the program. However, the government funded only two of those Texas jobs in the loan reimbursement program.

Educators say this is the crux of the issue: Students take on loans to go to veterinary school, and then must choose jobs that will allow them to repay their debt. A&M is less expensive than most veterinary schools, but its graduates still face this choice. And heading back to the urban or suburban life many of them grew up with to care for small animals is an easy call: 60 percent of the 2018 class plans to focus on small animals; historically that average has been closer to 70 percent.

“There is no way they are moving to Dumas to pull calves. They are going to be seeing Fifis in Highland Park. They are going to go where they can earn some money, and that's just the fact,” said Texas Tech Chancellor Tedd Mitchell.

This is why Texas Tech may be uniquely positioned to develop a pipeline of rural veterinarians. Tech attracts mostly students who grew up in West Texas, and many want to work in rural communities upon graduation and are willing to accept lower pay at the outset of their careers to do so.

Tech’s curriculum would reflect this difference, with students taking courses with professors who are working veterinarians in various rural areas in the region. It’s meant to be a career-oriented curriculum, rather than academic. Texas A&M, on the other hand, offers one of the best veterinary academic programs in the world and operates a veterinary hospital for students to get experience. Can Tech’s unusual approach meet the standard A&M has set? We’ll leave that question to the accreditation board.

West Texas is a crucial part of this state’s economy, the center of cattle, cotton and oil production, among other food and resources. The state must invest in West Texas and its institutions to support a full and balanced regional economy for the long term. The boom-bust oil cycle can make it hard for other industries to gain a toehold in the region, and that’s a drag on the whole state. An opportunity to beef up West Texas agriculture and education should be taken very seriously.

Texas veterinarians by the numbers

6,660 licensed, practicing veterinarians in Texas

60 percent of Texas veterinarians graduated from Texas A&M veterinary school

1,900 openings for new veterinarians in the U.S. each year, 195 in Texas

2,700 people graduate from veterinary schools in the U.S. each year, 130 in Texas

58 percent of Texas veterinarians focus on pets, or 3,918

180 livestock veterinarians work in Texas rural areas

73 percent of A&M veterinary graduates in 2014 were female, compared with 79 percent across the U.S.

Source: Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board

CORRECTION, 10:39 a.m., January 30, 2019: A prior version of this editorial gave the incorrect amount of donations Texas Tech has raised to pay for construction of the veterinary school. Tech has raised $90 million.

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