Learning hard lessons from veteran vets in the countryside

Inspired by a scene in a Soviet film that showed cattle and sheep roaming on a prairie under a blue sky and white clouds, He Jingrong, from Beijing, decided to specialize in caring for livestock when she went to university.

"I thought what a nice job it would be," said He, an 80-something retiree who was a senior vet at China Agricultural University Veterinary Teaching Hospital in Beijing's Haidian district.

She enrolled at China Agricultural University to study Western veterinary science in 1958.

Two years later, after the government decided to strengthen efforts to protect folk veterinary medicine, she was among the first group of students selected to major in a newly established traditional Chinese veterinary medicine course at the university.

At that time, over 80,000 of the 90,000 vets in China lived and worked in the countryside.

Without any textbooks, He and 13 other students went to the countryside to learn from veteran vets' practical experience in treating sick animals.

The knowledge passed down included things like heating the sole of a shoe and applying it to heal a rectal prolapse, and using an 8-year-old boy's urine as an ingredient to enhance the efficacy of a dose of medicine.

After graduation, the 14 vets were assigned to 14 different provinces.

He was sent to eastern China's Shandong province, where she had a hard time as she had to jump into sties to treat pigs and hurry around to treat an average of 50 patients a day.

Being a vet is a risky career, as He can attest. Two vets she knew died after they were kicked by horses.

One was kicked in the stomach and ruptured a kidney when examining a horse's forelegs.

One classmate decided to switch careers soon after graduation when a buffalo horn scarred her face while she was performing acupuncture on the animal's hind legs.

A dog bit off a doctor's nose and He, who returned to Beijing in 1970, had to have three rabies shots after being bitten by animals.

"Everybody looked down on us then," she said.

"My family would complain I had wasted five years in college, and that it would have been better to become a laborer."

However, she said the status of vets has been greatly boosted in recent years.

"Now people say it is a career to make money," He said.