Keynote speaker Dr. Eric Rooker gave veterinarians at the 2026 American Association of Bovine Practitioners Annual Conference a choice based on a hypothetical situation:
It’s Monday morning. The coffee has been poured and the first call comes in. A 75-year-old producer with what Rooker describes as a “terminal operation” wants a veterinarian to spend an hour trimming long-overdue feet. The second call comes from a dairy producer whose children have just taken ownership of the farm after a 20-year transition. He wants a veterinarian to sit down with the next generation, build a relationship and start talking about where the operation could go over the next 10 or 20 years.
The audience overwhelmingly chose the second call.
Then Rooker added money to the equation. First, the foot-trimming call paid the associate $200 while the consulting visit paid $150. Then he raised the foot-trimming incentive to $500.
The room became more divided.
“Think about why you made the choices you made in those moments,” Rooker asks of the audience. “And then when you think about why, think about how it made you feel emotionally.”
The exercise was playful, particularly for a room full of bovine veterinarians familiar with both calls. Its underlying question was more serious: What makes veterinary work fulfilling, and how often do the systems built around veterinarians push them toward work that does not fulfill them?
Looking Beyond Work-Life Balance
Rooker, a dairy practitioner and practice owner, challenges some of the profession’s prevailing conversations about what veterinarians need from their careers.
Compensation, corporate versus private ownership, work-life balance and the demands of emergency practice are frequent subjects when the profession talks about retention and burnout. Rooker doesn’t argue that those concerns should disappear. He acknowledges that veterinary salaries needed to increase, particularly as educational debt and the cost of living climb.
His argument is that they may not tell the whole story.
“I don’t hate my job,” Rooker says. “I am frustrated by my job on a regular basis.”
A veterinarian can love the profession and still hate the call that just came in. A practice owner can improve compensation and schedules, and still have an associate who is disengaged. An associate can have more time away from work and still return to work that does not feel meaningful.
Instead of concentrating only on how veterinarians can take a break from work, Rooker challenges you to think more carefully about what happens while they are there.
“Maybe the bigger question, the better question: What frustrates you about your job in the moment?” he says.
Three Needs Behind Fulfilling Veterinary Work
To answer that question, Rooker turns to self-determination theory, a well-established theory of human motivation developed through the work of psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan.
At its core, self-determination theory identifies three basic psychological needs associated with motivation and well-being: autonomy, competence and relatedness.
These needs can be translated into the realities of veterinary practice.
Autonomy is the sense that veterinarians have some control and choice in what they do. Competence is the opportunity to develop skills, become effective at something and use those abilities. Relatedness is the feeling that they belong and have meaningful relationships with the people around them.
For Rooker, those needs offer a different lens through which to view many of the frustrations veterinarians encounter every day.
“When we satisfy these needs, we get engaged,” he says. “We have meaningful relationships. We craft a meaning in the work that we do.”
Autonomy Does Not Require Controlling the Day
Complete control can be hard to come by in bovine practice.
Consider a calendar filled with herd checks, office work, consulting projects and, eventually, an ever-growing list of calls. Every new phone call could change the plan.
For a veterinarian on emergency duty, control may be even harder to find. The cow needing a C-section does not particularly care what was already on the schedule. Autonomy does not necessarily mean eliminating those demands. Sometimes it means creating choices within them.
Rooker describes small decisions he makes while on call, from deciding when to return a phone call to choosing the music he wants to hear while driving to an emergency.
“I have to do the thing, but I’m going to do it my way,” he says.
Practice owners can create those choices, too.
As an owner, consider blocking an hour or two for an associate whose day otherwise consists of taking whatever call comes through the door. Let that veterinarian read a scientific paper, practice a skill, evaluate a parlor or pursue something that interests them while someone else covers the phone.
“I got the phones, I got the calls,” Rooker says of the approach. “Go do something that you’re interested in.”
It may look like a small concession in a busy practice. To Rooker, it gives the associate something much larger: some ownership of the work.
Give Veterinarians the Chance to Get Good at Something
That protected time also feeds the second psychological need Rooker emphasizes: competence.
Veterinarians enter the profession with interests and skills they want to develop, yet the demands of day-to-day practice can make pursuing them difficult. When an associate brings an idea to practice leadership and is told to pursue it entirely on their own time, that can be exceptionally discouraging.
“When an associate or a fellow owner comes to you with an idea, always hash it out,” Rooker says. “Always talk to them as if it is interesting, even if it’s not interesting to you, because you never know where it’s going to go.”
He has seen where it can go.
Rooker had an associate in his own practice who was interested in developing a diagnostic service. The practice created time for him to pursue it.
What began as a relatively small service grew. The diagnostic work generated new questions from clients, which led the veterinarians to develop ways to examine outcomes and eventually opened the door to broader consulting conversations.
Today, Rooker says, the service requires multiple veterinarians to cover and generates multiple six figures for the practice.
The financial return, however, was not the important point.
Clients gained a new service. The practice developed new consulting opportunities. A veterinarian was able to pursue an interest, build expertise and create something that had not existed before.
“This wouldn’t exist if I made my associate do all of those calls,” Rooker says. “Satisfying competency is incredibly important.”
Rooker also encourages experienced veterinarians to give younger colleagues opportunities to demonstrate that competence. Early in his own career, he recalls senior veterinarians directing client questions about a subject he had studied back to him, publicly positioning the young veterinarian as the person with expertise.
His advice to other veterinarians is simple: “Give them the stage.”
Relatedness Goes Beyond Working on the Same Team
The third need, relatedness, may be the easiest to recognize and one of the easiest to lose in a busy veterinary practice.
It’s more than simply having coworkers or interacting with clients. Veterinarians need to feel genuinely valued and supported and to know that they are a meaningful part of the group.
Rooker offers an example that happened outside his practice.
He was attending a conference and began walking through the trade show. Another practice owner joined him. The two started talking about employee problems, inventory management and the everyday challenges and interests they shared as practitioners.
Soon, Rooker noticed their strides had matched. So had the speed and rhythm of their conversation.
The interaction wasn’t a formal mentoring session or scheduled meeting. It was simply two veterinarians exchanging ideas and recognizing value in what the other brought to the conversation.
Rooker encourages veterinarians to create more opportunities for those interactions in their own practices.
“Ask your associate to come out and go for a walk,” he says. “Pick their brain.”
Building Work Veterinarians Want to Do
None of Rooker’s arguments require veterinarians to stop caring about salary, time off or manageable schedules.
Instead, he challenges veterinarians to consider what those conversations may miss.
For an associate, that might mean identifying the moments when frustration comes from having little control, few opportunities to develop or a lack of connection with the people around them.
For a practice owner, it might mean asking whether the practice is giving veterinarians time to pursue ideas, opportunities to build expertise and enough choice to feel some ownership over their careers.
For an established veterinarian, it may be a reason to examine the difference between being tired from meaningful work and being drained by work that no longer feels purposeful.
Rooker encourages veterinarians to reconsider some of the burdens that come with the careers they have built: being tired from work they once fought for the opportunity to do, feeling overwhelmed by growth they once hoped to achieve and being challenged by a life created intentionally.
For a profession searching for ways to address burnout and keep veterinarians engaged, Rooker’s message is not that the work needs to become easy. It is that veterinarians and the practices employing them should pay closer attention to whether that work gives people the opportunity to build something they find worthwhile.
“What if it’s not our jobs? What if it’s not our clients?” Rooker asks. “What if it’s really just this lack of purposeful, mindful, supportive, basic psychological needs that’s holding our profession back?”
