One of the things my veterinarian colleagues talk about a lot is how do you make a diagnosis with "My chicken is acting funny" as the only information you have.
Being a vet is a tough job; they need to be able to diagnose problems with patients that can't speak and sometimes have very, very different anatomies. In farming communities in particular they can sometimes be critical to whether a livestock farmer succeeds or fails a season.
One of my favorite moments eavesdropping on some vet students taking their boards was listening to them complaining about the question involving ultrasounding a shark.
And this is why I write software for a living. Because "Take the chicken to pieces to find out why it's broken" makes sense to me, so I'd be a rubbish chicken doctor.
From what I understand, that actually is common for chickens because they're usually livestock rather than pets. If one chicken might be sick, you care more about whether it's contagious than the outcome to the one chicken, so you do the most thorough diagnostics you can even if that requires an autopsy.
I like working with vets for my stuff (epidemiology) because there are really interesting constraints.
As you mention, one chicken is expendable, but you're worried about tens of thousands of birds.
A sheep is...mostly expendable. You have a low, market driven cap on what you can spend.
A dog or cat, less so - there's an emotional connection, but there's also an upper threshold (with a wide range, and who has what threshold is often surprising).
A race horse...well, let's just say equine ICUs are really pretty nice, all things considered.
I think this is directed at me. If not, I apologize. I work on developing computational models for hospital infection control - both in human and veterinary settings.
Public - I work for a state university in the vet. college. I sometimes get to work with practitioners, but I'll admit I have better contacts for that on the human side of the equation, though we're working to build it for vets as well.
I'm faculty, so the notion of value is sort of a funny one, and it's less obvious than it might be at medical schools, but it's getting there. The biggest constraint, as with everything in vetmed, is money.
I believe my email is in my profile - feel free to reach out if you want to chat more.
