Dr. Robert Cope — known to friends, clients and acquaintances simply as Cope — has been the main cattle veterinarian in Lemhi County for 44 years. He’s had a mixed practice with patients of all species, but his most loyal clients are the ranchers who depended on him.

Several veterinarians in the area work on small animals or horses. A few large-animal veterinarians have come and gone, but Cope is the only one who stayed. He has also dedicated much of his time in behind-the-scenes public service.

Cope’s prostate cancer has spread into his spine and he can no longer walk. He recently sent a letter to his clients letting them know even though he’s wheelchair bound, he’ll still strive to help them over the phone and with any tasks he can manage physically.

He was born January 12, 1951, in Topeka, Kansas and grew up on a small farm near Netawaka. His journey from Kansas to a small rural community in Idaho was an unexpected detour; he did not intend to become a veterinarian.

Graduating from high school with high honors, he was a National Merit finalist and Kansas’ Presidential Scholar for 1969. Wanting a Navy career, he was appointed to the U.S. Naval Academy, but because he’d injured a knee playing basketball his senior year of high school he didn’t physically qualify. So he enrolled at Kansas State University, received a bachelor of science degree in 1973, and doctor of veterinary medicine degree in 1975. He says he planned to go into engineering but it was really hot in Kansas, and the vet school was closer to the cafeteria — which had air conditioning.

After graduation he practiced in Bowman, North Dakota, until October 1977.

“It was a bad situation; my paychecks were bouncing so the guy I worked for made me a deal. He said, ‘You do the work, I’ll furnish the drugs and we’ll split the revenue.’ That worked fine except he wouldn’t send me any drugs!” Cope said.

There was an ad that fall in the American Veterinary Association Journal about a mountain practice in Idaho for sale. Cope decided to go look.

“I tell people Lou Gehrig was wrong. He said he was the luckiest man on the face of the earth, but I was that luckiest man. I wandered in here and found my true home. I was able to spend 44 years doing what I loved, with the people I loved, and where I loved doing it. I’ve lived a life that other men could only dream of!” Cope said.

He drove into Salmon for the first time in October 1977. “I’m not a big John Denver fan, but I like some of his music, and the opening line of ‘Rocky Mountain High’ says it all: ‘He was born in the summer of his 27th year, coming home to a place he’d never been before,’ and damned if that didn’t happen to me!”

His clients are glad he found Salmon, Idaho.

“It was never supposed to happen. Not passing the Navy physical changed my career path. I never would have seen Idaho. My knee was considered too bad to stand on a ship, but I spent the next 45 years wrestling 1,500-pound critters!” he said.

He purchased the Blue Cross Veterinary Clinic in November 1977 and married his wife Terrie in 1980.

Assisting ranchers

When Cope arrived in Salmon, ranchers were fighting several disease issues. His predecessors Dr. Pete South and Dr. Ron Skinner had been working with researchers at University of Idaho to determine the cause of “weak calf syndrome” and discovering that many disease issues were the result of impaired immune system due to BVD (bovine virus diarrhea). Cope continued the research and was able to show that controlling BVD could reduce the incidence of many other disease problems.

He worked with local ranchers on innovative vaccination programs; his clients were some of the first in the nation to use modified live virus BVD vaccine at branding time for calves, and for cows pre-breeding, and making sure every replacement heifer received three doses before going into the breeding herd. He also recommended giving calves clostridial vaccines at birth in some herds, to prevent “enterotoxemia.” Death losses were greatly decreased.

Dale Edwards, whose ranch along the Salmon River has been in his family multiple generations, says Cope has always listened to and learned from his clients.

“One of the biggest things he did for our ranching community was figure out BVD,” Edwards said.

Bruce McConnell, a rancher near Leadore, says Cope helped improve cattle health.

“A few years ago I was talking with a Boehringer Ingelheim Animal Health vaccine rep. He said Cope was one of the first to recommend and use modified live BVD vaccine,” McConnell said.

Cope was always doing research.

“Cattle here have a good reputation for health, thanks to Cope. Cattle buyers know that calves from our region will be healthy; they always sell well. I think a lot of it is because we’ve overcome the BVD problems,” McConnell said. “Cope was a couple decades ahead of everybody else in dealing with this, and BVD is no longer an issue here.”

His clients are grateful for his assistance in all areas of cattle health, but 44 years of being a cattle vet has taken its toll.

“Cope told me he wore out one arm preg-checking tens of thousands of cows and was starting to wear out the other one,” McConnell said.

Even with failing health the last few years (heart problems, pacemaker, ruptured appendix and peritonitis, prostate cancer) Cope continued to put in long days pregnancy-checking cows and all the other jobs ranchers needed him to do.

“He preg-checked cows for me last fall, and it was obvious he was hurting and slowing down. A year earlier he came to my place to deal with a prolapse. He’d just had a pacemaker put in, but he didn’t want to quit. It was the first time I’d ever heard him say he needed to take a break for a few minutes. In the past he just kept going with brute strength and determination but eventually his body wore out,” McConnell said.

Clients are family

His ranch clients are missing him acutely — not only because there’s no one else to do pregnancy checking, bull testing, Bangs vaccinations, or deal with cattle health issues and emergency midnight calving problems, but also because they miss him as a friend they enjoyed visiting with on every veterinary call.

Phil Moulton, ranching on Wimpy Creek, says Cope has always been selfless and accommodating. “He reminds me of the James Herriot stories. He’d do anything to help you with a problem, even if it’s the middle of the night and nasty weather,” Moulton said.

“Last year he told me the ranchers of the Lemhi Valley have been his family. He said his father died young; he didn’t have much family. He loves and appreciates the ranchers here, and we love and appreciate him.”

Moulton met Cope the summer of 1978.

“I was in high-school, between sophomore and junior year, and played on a softball team with Cope. I was in the outfield and he played first base. He was this great big guy, like Babe Ruth, who could swat balls over the fence so easily!” said Moulton. “Cope and Terrie had game nights at their house, and anyone was welcome to come play cards and board games. Cope loaned lots of books to friends. He loaned me a Tom Clancy novel, Rainbow Six. I want to take it back to him and have him sign it, and I want to keep it!”

Cope tried to help ranchers learn more about cattle health; for many years he wrote a monthly newsletter and included a lot of information.

“I wish I’d kept them all. He was always willing to share his knowledge,” Moulton said.

“Cope always has our best interests in mind, with affordable fees,” said Dale Edwards. “Most vets today are mainly interested in money and if the work doesn’t fit their lifestyle they’re not eager to help. If a calf needs pulling in the middle of the night, they won’t come; they want scheduled hours. But schedules are irrelevant in the cattle business. Cope was always on call. He might be a little grumpy when he got there; he was probably tired because he’d been to 10 ranches that day and a bunch of nights in a row,” Dale said.

McConnell says that even when Cope was County Commissioner and away at meetings he’d try to help a client. He’d answer his cell phone wherever he was.

“One time when he was in Washington D.C. I called him because I had an emergency and no other vet would come. He told me what to do, over the phone,” McConnell said.

“He cares about people. It was always fun when he came to work cows because he has a great sense of humor and tells great stories. And always practical, trying to keep costs down for us,” McConnell said. “Ranchers have to look at dollars and cents. Cope understands this. Even people who were really slow paying still got his best efforts. Some of the newer vets won’t work for you if you are slow paying. Even after he sold his clinic and worked from home, he stocked all the vaccines and medications ranchers might need and we could always get our supplies from him.”

Cope’s dedication to his clients/patients, and his humility, are rare today. He feels the young vets coming out of school are at a big disadvantage.

“When I was in school our professors spent four years explaining to us how stupid we were; we knew we were (dumb) when we started practicing, and we were ready to learn something. But kids coming out of vet school today think they know it all — and it’s really difficult to learn when you already know everything,” Cope said. “Ranch medicine should be about lifestyle and not how much leisure time you have or how much money you make. If you do it the way I did, this can be a great profession.

“Someone recently told me they thought money was never a factor with me. But actually it was. I figured that in anything I did, if it wasn’t profitable for the rancher I shouldn’t be doing it. My fees should be such that I made some money, but so did the rancher. If my fee was more than the cow was worth, I shouldn’t be doing it. If you do it right, you’re not just an employee or a consultant or the veterinarian; you become part of the extended family of everyone in the valley. And that’s an incredible experience that none of these young kids coming out of school will ever have, unless they are doing it for the lifestyle. It makes life really worthwhile.”

June Mahaffey Playfair grew up on the Mahaffey ranch near Lemhi and had just graduated from high school when Cope arrived.

“We’d call him whenever we needed him to come out. But he’d also stop at our place if he was up this way in the middle of the night taking care of calving problems on other ranches. One time he pulled a calf for Whitsons and it was 20 below zero. Tom Whitson got a bucket of water out of the river for Cope to use and it was freezing cold,” she recalled. “The cow and calf were fine, but Cope was very cold when he started home so he stopped at our house. He knew we always had the wood stove going — and also knew where the whiskey bottle was! Mother heard something and came out of the bedroom in her nightgown and found him in the kitchen. She asked, ‘Did we have a C-section?’ Cope said, ‘No. This is just a good place to warm up!’

All his clients have interesting or funny stories to tell about adventures with Cope and the animals he treated. “If I could remember all the crazy things that happened in my career it would make James Herriot’s life seem uneventful in comparison,” Cope said. “I read his books three times. I read them once before I went to vet school and thought they were nice fairy tales. I read them again after I’d been in practice a year and thought ‘Yup. Every bit of that is real.’

“I read them one more time a few years later and thought, ‘Gee, those guys don’t work very hard—lying around on the grass all the time looking at the clouds!”

Advocate for ranchers

Even before he became a county commissioner in 2000, Cope began helping ranchers fight their many battles for survival. He did necropsies of the calf and the wolf that killed it at Gene Hussey’s ranch in January 1995, proving that the wolf had indeed killed the calf rather than just eating on a stillborn calf as the feds contended, seeking to prosecute the rancher for the shooting the wolf.

After a challenging confrontation with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Cope became involved with issues ranchers face from federal government and public land use constraints. Due to his experience with wolf introduction, he was asked by Jim Caswell (head of Idaho’s Office of Species Conservation, which provided policy focus for endangered species issues, coordinating state and federal efforts) to write a memorandum of understanding to serve as the framework to allow the state to distribute federal funds to livestock owners with predation losses. Cope became chairman of Idaho’s Wolf Depredation Compensation Committee, a position he held for nearly 10 years.

He chaired the Central Idaho Resource Advisory Committee, representing local government at the national level. He was instrumental in development of the Idaho Roadless Rule, which allows active management on Roadless Areas on the National Forests — enabling range permittees to continue to manage grazing in those areas.

He was also a member of the Idaho Sage Grouse Task Force, president of the Western Interstate Region of the National Association of Counties, and chair of the Environment, Energy and Land Use Steering Committee. He served on the Forest Service’s committee to guide implementation of the 2012 Forest Planning Rule, and was a member of EPA’s Local Government Advisory Council, where he became chairman of the Small Communities Advisory subcommittee.

He tried to educate politicians about challenges facing western ranchers and small communities, but most people don’t know the full extent of his contributions. Cope never said much about it “because if you give yourself a high profile it just makes you a target,” he said.

He kept a low profile on the political side and just did his best to help promote the betterment of ranchers and his community.

“He always understood the plight of ranchers and got involved in national politics as County Commissioner,” says Dale Edwards. “He helped as much as he could, with the ill wind blowing against us.”

The Lemhi County Cattle and Horse Growers Association nominated him for induction into the Eastern Idaho Agricultural Hall of Fame and will be taking him to that ceremony and banquet at Fort Hall Idaho on March 18th.