Large Animal Vet Holds Her Own
Fredericksburg was established by German settlers in the 1840’s in ranching country about 70 miles west of Austin. Although the main street caters primarily to tourists, Gillespie County’s 1,000 acres sports more than 100,000 farm animals on its livestock ranches, small and large, for hobby and business. And when those cows, goats, longhorns and sheep get sick, many ranchers bring them to the Hill Country Veterinary Clinic a couple of miles from downtown Fredericksburg. The clinic was started by Laird Laurence in 1978 as a “mixed animal” practice, meaning Laurence and his colleagues treat everything from bison to Chihuahuas.
In 2009, after over 40 years of wrestling calves out of their mamas at 2 a.m., spending Saturdays tweezing porcupine quills out of snarling hounds’ snouts and being chilled to the bone on winter mornings checking bulls for STDs at the auction yard, Laurence was tired. “My knees hurt, my hips hurt, and my arms hurt,” he said recently. So he hired Amy Jo Pilmer. Unlike other candidates for the job, Pilmer wasn’t afraid of getting dirty, and she was good with people. “I don’t care what you know or don’t know about large animals,” Laurence said, “it’s your personality that gets you a long way down the road in this type of practice.”
Pilmer is a study in contradictions. She cried so hard the night she had to put an old boxer down that the owners had to console her, and yet she carries a loaded 9 mm pistol in her purse for night calls, because “you never know with drunken cowboys.” She wears a Harley Davidson riding jacket when she cruises the Hill Country on her 1946 Servicycle motorcycle, but a cluster of miniature stuffed animals crowd her bedside table in her apartment above the clinic. When she heads to Main Street to hear honky-tonk music on a Saturday night she wears a baggy long sleeve T-shirt, jeans and flip-flops, with a diamond-encrusted TAG Heuer watch (“I have a watch fetish, what can I say?”) Where she never wavers is in her desire to spend her life caring for animals.
Born in 1974 in San Angelo, Texas, to a father she admiringly refers to as a workaholic and a stay-at-home mother, Pilmer began her lifetime relationship with animals with a special friendship with a pet possum named Willie. She wasn’t just attached to the family pet, she wanted to learn how to treat them. Under the guidance of her uncle, a vet near San Antonio, Pilmer spent afternoons and weekends sweeping stalls, clipping dogs’ toenails and sterilizing bloody instruments — “Nothing that would ever make you want to be a veterinarian,” she said. But the pungent smells and dirty grunt work didn’t deter her. Instead, she fell in love with the profession, and not just because of the animals. “My uncle’s clients were every class of people from the poor to the rich,” said Pilmer, “and I loved educating the people and helping animals all at once.”
Even though she worked at a clinic for 10 years, she waited till she was 30 to go to veterinary school. In 2005 she moved to St. Kitts in the West Indies to study at Ross University School for Veterinary Medicine for two years, then moved to Stillwater, Oklahoma, to finish her degree at Oklahoma State University.
For Pilmer, the choice to treat both large and small animals in rural Texas had less to do with the animals themselves and more to do with their owners. As a mixed-animal veterinarian, in exchange for smaller fees and longer hours, she gets to be outside with ranchers who tell stories about the good old days, shake her hand and look her in the eye. While pet owners in the city might be clutching their smartphone in one hand and Princess the pooch in the other, a country client might stop by the clinic to share a cold beer and a casual chat. She could make more money in the city, but that’s not what mattered. “I didn’t want to be that vet in the million-dollar practice in the white coat who’s going to charge you $3,000 to treat your dog,” she said. “I wanted to be the simple person to help you out.”