M ost graduating veterinarians begin practicing veterinary medicine directly after completing veterinary school, and 48% to 54% will treat small animal patients exclusively or predominantly. 1-3 Consequently, it is the responsibility of educators in veterinary schools to adequately prepare new graduates for entrylevel small animal practice. In doing so, educators must emphasize basic veterinary skills and knowledge while still disseminating the most current information and techniques. This can be somewhat problematic because most academicians determining clinical curricula at veterinary schools in the United States are specialists in defined areas of veterinary clinical medicine and are not involved with general veterinary practice.Private veterinary practitioners who employ new veterinary school graduates are ideally qualified to identify the day-to-day skills and knowledge needed by new graduates, by virtue of their experiences as practicing veterinarians and employers. 4-8 Input from private practitioners has previously been used to aid curriculum development in small animal surgery and bovine medicine and surgery. 4-9 To our knowledge, however, input regarding the entire small animal curriculum has not previously been obtained from private practitioners exclusively or predominantly treating small animal patients. demic veterinarians involved with general small animal practice; and a nonveterinarian specialist in small animal nutrition were consulted during questionnaire development. Each person involved with questionnaire development was asked to submit a list of the 10 most important procedures, skills, or areas of knowledge within his or her area of practice that he or she thought a new graduate should be proficient in on the day of graduation from veterinary school. Lists were provided for anesthesiology, behavior, cardiology, internal medicine, neurology, oncology, ophthalmology, pathology (including gross pathology and clinical pathology), radiology, general surgery, orthopedic surgery, oncologic surgery, general practice, emergency and critical care, practice management, and nutrition. All lists were compared, and duplicate entries were eliminated. Final entries were categorized as a procedure (54 entries), skill (78), or area of knowledge (37) by the authors. There were a total of 169 entries in the questionnaire. The questionnaire was validated by a group of local small animal private practitioners, and their suggestions were incorporated in the final questionnaire. a The first question on the questionnaire asked whether the respondent was a veterinary practitioner