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The problem is a boom in supply (that is, vets) and a decline in demand (namely, veterinary services). Class sizes have been rising at nearly every school, in some cases by as much as 20 percent in recent years. And the cost of vet school has far outpaced the rate of inflation. It has risen to a median of $63,000 a year for out-of-state tuition, fees and living expenses, according to the Association of American Veterinary Medical Colleges, up 35 percent in the last decade.

This would seem less alarming if vets made more money. But starting salaries have sunk by about 13 percent during the same 10-year period, in inflation-adjusted terms, to $45,575 a year, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association. America may be pet-crazed and filled with people eager to buy expensive fetch toys and heated cat beds. But the total population of pets is going down, along with the sums that owners are willing to spend on the health care of their animals, one of the lesser-known casualties of the recession.

Today, the ratio of debt to income for the average new vet is roughly double that of M.D.’s, according to Malcolm Getz, an economist at Vanderbilt University. To practitioners in the field, such numbers are ominous, and they portend lean times for new graduates.

“We’re calling for more bodies coming through the veterinary educational pipeline at higher and higher cost at the very point in time that we need fewer and fewer,” says Dr. Eden Myers, a vet in Mount Sterling, Ky., who runs the Web site JustVetData, where she crunches numbers about the profession. “And they are going to get paid less and less.”

For years, the veterinary medical association contended that the United States needed more vets, not fewer, especially in rural areas. To support this view, in 2007, the organization helped underwrite a study, hoping to bolster a call for government assistance to help meet a putative shortfall of 15,000 vets by 2024.

The results, released last year, came to a strikingly different conclusion. Titled “Assessing the Current and Future Workforce Needs in Veterinary Medicine” and conducted under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences, the study found little evidence of vet shortages. It also concluded that “the cost of veterinary education is at a crisis point.”

Grandpa's Spells wrote:Eye-drops from vet or Walgreen's, $70. From CostCo, $15 dollars. Same med.