Covington, GA

For Zoe Latimer, a large animal veterinarian in Newton County, everyday is a dream come true. Latimer, who provides top of the line vet care for horses at Countryside Vet Services in Covington and the surrounding areas, grew up with a love for horses, and knew from an early age she wanted to become a vet. So, when the time came, she leaned into that passion and became one.

“I never remember ever wanting to be anything but a vet. I think from literally as long as I can remember, I wanted to work with horses and I wanted to be a vet,” says Latimer. “My mom always wanted to go to vet school, she never did, so she was really glad when I started expressing that I wanted to be a vet. She was like, ‘Oh, yeah! We can have a vet in the family’, but yeah, I never saw myself doing anything else, this was pretty much it. This was plan A, B, and C. So, I only applied to one school; I put all my eggs in one basket. I know they tell you not to do that, but I did and you know, it worked out, thankfully.”

Latimer, who is relatively new to the trade, strives to care for the animals and customers she’s sees to the best of her ability, and with her clientele, she has more freedom to do that as she cares for mostly high-end horses.

“I love the good clients, I really do. Like, the people that love to see us and you know, they do what you recommend. I just love coming to work for them and their animals and helping them get better and helping improve agriculture,” says Latimer. “I mean we have a very nice client base, we get to work on a lot of performance horses. You know, not just your backyard animals, I get to do a lot of high-end horses, which means we get to see a lot of beautiful horses, and people want to do a lot of cool treatments, or we can go a lot further with a lot of these cases, because the horses are so valuable, or like somebody has a big emotional attachment to them and so they’re willing to go above and beyond to try to fix their horse, which makes me excited. Like when somebody says that they want to go for treatment, because I’m like, ‘you know, now we get to fix it, or at least we get to try our hardest you know, to fix it.’ We don’t always succeed, but we give it our best shot.”

In the end though, to Latimer, the most important part of it all is caring for the animals; working to get them back to health, regardless of whether they’re high-end or not, as she knows people’s animals are often viewed as family.

“In our performance horses, it’s always you know, getting after that Blue Ribbon. You know, the better our clients’ horses perform, the better that makes us look, so like, “how’s your horse going so good?’ or like, ‘who fixed your horse for you, because it was doing x, y, and z,’ and so, we fix them and we get them running like a well-oiled machine again,” says Latimer. “That’s important to me, is to get them back out there as quick as we can, at least on the performance horse side and then, obviously, a very important part to me too is these horses that we work on that are like family members. People love them. They have them for thirty-five years and they’ll live forever, and so really it’s important to me to make sure people feel like their family members are taken care of and that we’ve got your back.”

By: John Holcomb