As Ivan Petch and Bruce Nicol hung up their stethoscopes after nearly 100 combined years of veterinary practice, the Paeroa business partners sat down to reflect on their careers.
Ivan and Bruce sold their Puke Rd practice, formerly known as Paeroa Veterinary Services, to Franklin Vets in 2016. They stayed on until only recently – initially to facilitate the handover, and later extending their tenure due to Covid-19.
Veterinary work has changed significantly over the years, the pair told The Profile.
“When Bruce and I started in practice it was more or less emergency work, virtually identical to the James Herriot work you see on TV,” Ivan said.
“And now it’s more preventative medicine with vaccination programmes, mastitis control programmes, foot rot control programmes.”
It wasn’t uncommon, the pair said, to work through the entire spring season with hardly any breaks.
“We worked bloody hard, especially in the earlier days, when there were just two of us here,” Bruce said.
“In the spring we were on backup or on duty… for six weeks, virtually every night and every weekend all you did was veterinary stuff.”
And the emergencies always seemed to happen after-hours.
“I don’t know why it is, but most dramas happen at night. The bitch whelpings and the calvings; horse colics always seem to be at night,” Ivan said.
“That’s just part of being a rural vet, and you just get on with it,” added Bruce.
Farm structures have changed over the years though, they said, with fewer family-run farms and more conglomerates. Technological advances, increasing herd sizes, and a shift to more business-like hours have also affected the nature of the job.
“Farming’s gone from a way of life to more of a commercial business in a sense, [and] there’s more prevention so there’s less problems [on the farm],” Bruce said.
The vet’s role has also changed over the years. As specialist vet services increased, the pair found they were less called-upon to be “jack-of-all-trades”, and able to refer cases like broken bones to dedicated orthopedic vets.
“A lot of vets now specialise in large animal work or dairy work around here, because the Hauraki Plains is mainly a dairy area,” Ivan said.
“For us the mainstay of our practice has been dairy farming, and cats and dogs. And the small animal side of it has grown significantly over the years. We used to be able to do our small animal work in the afternoon, a couple of days a week. But now the practice has got one person employed full time doing cats and dogs.”
Ivan and Bruce have also seen many farming trends come and go through the years.
“We’ve had rabbit farming, fitch [ferret] farming, emus and ostriches. Angora goat farming, that was the big one for a while. At one stage we had 12 deer farms, but they’ve all gone,” they said.
“If you got in early, in the very early stages, some people made a lot of money out of [fads].”
Now, as the pair step back from the business, they’ve started to think of other ways to fill their time. But unsurprisingly, they’re just as busy as ever.
“I still play a bit of squash and tennis and things like that… Ivan’s been well involved with Rotary and I’ve been involved with Lions,” Bruce said.
“I reckon I’m busier now than I was. I don’t know how I worked full time and did all this stuff.”
And with family, friends, and a few remaining business ties in the area, neither man has any plans to move on from Paeroa in a hurry.
“I was in [the clinic] the other day just calling in for morning tea, just to keep an eye on what’s happening,” Ivan said.
“It’s hard after 40-something years just to suddenly stop.”
