No, there is no recognized specialty of "orthopedic surgeon", just small animal and large animal surgeons (American College of Veterinary Surgeons). I'm not 100% sure but I think the European and Australian equivalents are the same.
There are ACVS diplomates that limit their practice to orthopedic surgery and some that limit their practice to soft-tissue surgery. Most of these are at teaching hospitals but some are in private practice. However most private practice surgeon prefer to not limit their practice to one or the other.
Do you know what being an orthopedic specialist is like?
A typical day would start by seeing appointments. These are pretty quick because they are usually already diagnosed or can be diagnosed in the exam room. Orthopods like this -- if they wanted diagnostic challenges they would have gone into medicine. And some rechecks, which usually involves a quick exam and some x-rays to see how things are healing. They will also see some chronic arthritis patients that are managed with medication and physical therapy. The typical orthopod doesn't like these cases, because they like things they can fix with surgery.
Then off to surgery, which is where the fun is. The most common surgery is a ruptured cruciate. Others are luxating patellas, total hip implants, and arthroscopes. At some places you see a lot of fractures, at other places not very many. Plates, screws, chisels, saws, drills -- preferably power driven -- the more equipment they get to play with and the more metal they get to implant the happier they are. A typical surgery is probably 1-2 hours but they can have some really long ones, like a shattered pelvis that takes 6 hours to fix.
Most patients get post-op xrays to assess things and then the patient is recovered. They usually start physical therapy early.
In general there are very few if any emergency orthopedic surgeries. A broken bone or ruptured ligament hardly ever needs to be fixed right now. (Emergency soft tissue surgeries are much more common -- gastric torsions, colics, perforated bowls, hemoabdomen, c sections.)
Spinal surgery is a little different. There also is no recognized neurosurgery specialty. Spines are usually done by ACVS or ACVIM(Neurology) diplomates. Some surgeons do spine surgeries, some don't. These days almost all neurologists do spine surgery although there are a few older neurologists that only do medical neurology. Emergency spine surgery (usually thoracolumbar disc extrusions) are VERY common. Also these patients usually need more extensive diagnostic testing, such as myelograms, CT or MRI.
So between appointments and surgeries, you can have a very busy day. But unless you do spines, you won't have much emergency duty and it's very feasible for an orthopod to work a 4-day week.
If you're at a teaching hospital, you also have teaching and in many cases research responsibilities.
