Using educational resources on exotic animals for practice support

Katherine Quesenberry, DVM, MPH, DABVP (Avian), chief medical officer, senior veterinarian, specialist in avian medicine and service head of avian and exotic medicine for Schwarzman Animal Medical Center in New York, New York, recently offered her insights on exotic pets in a dvm360 interview. She spoke about conditions that commonly affect exotic companion animals, the types of traumatic injuries veterinarians frequently see with birds, rabbits and reptiles, and her most memorable cases. In this video, she speaks about education support for practitioners to use in treating exotic species.

The following is a transcript of the video:

dvm360: What’s one thing veterinary professionals should know about exotic animal medicine?

Katherine Quesenberry, DVM, MPH, DABVP (Avian): I think if you're interested in exotics, there's so many resources now to learn. There are so many amazing conferences that you can go to or seminars online. It's so different now than it was like 30 years ago, where the resources were very limited. Now, there's resources all over the place, and there's some amazing people doing amazing things with exotics, and the field is just expanding every day.

If you're interested, I would say, ‘just jump in and do it.’ Don't be afraid to do it. And then, the basics of, anything, of dealing with these animals is, certainly, they have their differences in physiology and anatomy, but it's a lot of the basics [of] veterinary medicine. So…you can triage in an emergency situation, you can provide fluids, you can provide pain medication. You just need a formulary to look up how to do it, and that's so available now and online. You can get that information very, very quickly. So I'm hoping that…more people feel more comfortable treating exotics in emergencies.