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Not really, no. What vets do is mostly determined by supply and demand. If all vets suddenly wanted to specialize in treating some rare kind of pet, for example a squid, it would not mean that there would suddenly appear lots of pet squids waiting to be treated.
There's probably tons of vets that really want to work with exotic animals on a zoo staff, not so many jobs to go around- this is the usual pattern for such things- the majority of vets being women working on designer dogs is because owners of designer dogs have money to spend.
Even the very largest and most ‘elite’ (meaning well funded) zoos have a handful - like 3-6 - full time vets on staff, meanwhile they might have a hundred zookeepers. The same major city might have thousands of full-time vets who work on domestic animals.
My understanding is that the vets who are on staff handle most day to day stuff or surgery for minor injuries, ailments, sicknesses, and then if they actually need to, say, operate on a lion they’ll just go to the country’s most prestigious veterinary college and find some professor who has spent 20 years working with them in the wild in Africa and have him do it, probably for free.
The only way to be a real big exotic mammal vet is probably to go to Africa or Asia and work on a big wildlife reserve.
How do you know so much about so many different topics? You talk about zoos like you work at one as well as you know about like, the obscure ethnic tensions of Singapore or Saudi Arabia or whatever. I'm always fascinated by your extensive knowledge of so many different things. What motivates you to have such a deep understanding of so many different topics? People usually get annoyed with me in real life when I try to relate my obscure knowledge of things, mostly they don't want to be corrected or have their beliefs challenged they just want to assert their own opinions at me. Do you talk about these things with people in real life as well?
I talk about some of them in real life, politics (without saying many of my own opinions, just neutrally), economics, AI is a big one now I guess, sometimes pop culture or literature or art. I’ve always loved zoos; probably most of the money I’ve given to charity in my life has been to zoos and animal conservation. Obscure history and geography and demographic / cultural stuff is just from a lifetime of reading the news, when I was a kid I read the Wall Street Journal my dad left when he went to work when I got home from school every single day, I won’t say front to back but probably near enough. Then the usual route of becoming very online as a tween, finding weird online atheism, then probably from there babby’s first geopolitics, stuff like Fukuyama and Diamond’s guns germs and steel, then moldbug and TLP and the other usual suspects, then VS Naipaul who is very good on the interesting things that happened in Islam between 1970 and 1990 around the Muslim world. My parents love reading non-fiction, which I think for a long time I looked down on as a kind of petit bourgeois midbrow habit but which has definitely allowed me to semi-productively waste thousands of hours arguing on the internet. I remember reading a huge book, maybe a journal or memoir of some European officer or diplomat, writing about 19th century travels through Central Asia, Silk Road stuff, when I was maybe 12 and getting a couple of hours of sleep a night. I also have regular phases of specific special interests like rococo or the history of musical instruments or certain kinds of cooking or human expansion out of Africa or the history of horticulture or the sexual revolution and the early years of playboy magazine or psychoactive fungi etc etc over the years where I’ll read like a dozen books on something over a month and then get bored.
I’ve met a few other people like this in real life, and there are more than a few others here. It makes for fun conversation when you find one, because it’s almost impossible that your knowledge overlaps perfectly, so you always learn a few interesting things.
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