CAYUGA - Dr. Thomas Gill can tell a lot about a cow just by flicking its side.

Like most large-animal vets, Gill works from the road without the luxury of X-rays and examination rooms. So he's learned to trust his hearing to diagnose problems such as cows whose stomachs have become twisted or flipped.

Using a stethoscope, he listens for a distinct noise similar to a bouncing basketball.

"If I hear a ping in a certain location, I can diagnose what it is," Gill said after checking out a cow on Roy Horbst's Cayuga dairy farm.

It may seem like an antiquated way to diagnose something as serious as a twisted stomach, but it's the best Gill has available to him. He hardly spends any time in his office at Brookside Veterinary Clinic in Auburn. He works out of his pickup truck, and his examination rooms are often the large barns his bovine patients call home.

Gill is part of a declining breed of doctors in rural America: the large-animal veterinarian. Fewer vet school students are choosing to work with cows and horses, opting instead for more lucrative jobs in small-animal care.

"There aren't farm kids going to vet or ag school now," he said.

And those who go to vet school are more likely to work with small animals when they graduate. At the end of 2004, only 6 percent of the American Veterinary Medical Association's membership work in food animal - or livestock - practice. More than 72,000 veterinarians belong to AVMA.

"It's a national concern. It's not a new problem, but it seems to be of a greater concern every year," said Dr. Rick Hackett, chair of the clinical sciences at the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine.

It used to be that veterinary students who grew up on farms and had prior experience with large animals would be more likely to continue that into their profession, Hackett said. But decline in rural populations are yielding fewer students with that passion.

Large-animal vets also have a hectic lifestyle and are on call virtually 24 hours a day. That's not so with small animal vets, most of whom have after-hours calls referred to emergency clinics.

"After 6 p.m., you can go home and not get called," Hackett said.

There's also the earning potential with small animal care that can be more appealing. Hackett said people are more willing to spend money on their pets, and many farmers are learning how to do basic care for their herds instead of calling in a vet.

"It's a business," he said. "A cow is an economic unit as opposed to a pet."

Stanley Zabriskie, of Aurora, has raised cows for about 25 years. He only has a few heifers now, but he's delivered many calves himself and usually only called a vet when there was a major problem.

"You get pretty talented at turning a calf," he said. "We always woke up and sat there until they gave birth."

But when there have been problems, having his vet available with a simple phone call was priceless.

"They've always made it in time. They're worth anything," Zabriskie said. "It takes a special person."

Dr. Gill didn't think at first that he would choose large-animal care as his profession.

"A lot of people wanted to go to vet school since they were 5 years old," Gill said. "That wasn't so with me."

It took until the summer between his sophomore and junior years at Hamilton College when he had the epiphany that large-animal work was his life's work. He spent that summer working with a dairy vet in Pennsylvania - where he used to spend summers on a dairy farm growing up - and found his calling.

"I went back to school and took five lab classes to have the prerequisites for vet school," he said.

Gill graduated from Cornell in 1984, one of the few graduates in his class focused on large animal care. He worked his first seven years as a sole practitioner, but he now has an associate to lessen his workload.

Even with the help, he's typically working 10-hour days. His practice takes him from Genoa to Cato, from Skaneateles to Waterloo.

"I still love it, otherwise I wouldn't be doing it," Gill said.

He has scheduled appointments during the day, but emergency calls often throw his plans out of whack.

In one instance, Gill was scheduled to teach a calving class at 6 a.m., but was called away to an emergency - complications with a birth. The calf was too large for the heifer, and it had already died before being delivered.

"When we get called, we know it's a big problem," he said while cleaning up the calving gown he wore for the procedure. Gill cleaned the gown with salt water and mint-scented disinfectant because the lubricant used to make the birth easier on the heifer is so sticky.

"It saves a little money on the laundry when you wear the gowns," joked Robyn Harper, a fourth-year veterinary student at Tufts University in Massachusetts who recently interviewed with Gill for a job and was along to help for the emergency delivery.

"The cows are a challenge," she said. "It's going to be tough being short and being a woman."

Harper is part of another trend in the veterinary field. Women make up about 76 percent of students currently enrolled in veterinary colleges, according to AVMA.

"Traditionally, large animal has been a guy's thing," Gill said.

The role of the large-animal vet - as well as the demographics of the doctors - is changing with sophistication of the medicine they are able to practice. The bulk of Gill's work is tending to dairy herds.

Now, it's as much about tending to the individual cow as it is about treating the whole herd though educating the owners about dangers of infections. Gill even sells medications to his clients out of his traveling pick-up truck office.

"There are all different levels to what we do. We do the grunt work, like delivering calves and sharing our medical expertise," Gill said. "You get a little bit of everything."

Staff writer Liz Hacken can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 267

or elizabeth.hacken@lee.net