Hog Wild About Pigs

She may have grown up in suburban Chicago, but Dr. Melissa Hensch sure loves her pigs.

“My friends and family ask me a lot of questions,” Hensch says. “I love helping explain what I actually do.

“Sometimes even my closest relatives I have to explain the whole process. It’s been an eye-opening experience to me. I’m surprised at how little people know about modern pig production.”

Hensch has a lot of experience in swine production. After graduating from Iowa State, she spent almost three years at Innovative Agriculture Solutions, a small private consulting practice in suburban Des Moines.

The practice was swine-exclusive and provided her with a broad range of hands-on experiences. Since leaving Innovative Agriculture Solutions, Hensch has spent the vast majority of her professional career with The Maschhoffs, the largest family-owned pork production network in North America, in a variety of positions.

Now the director of health and animal care at The Maschhoffs, Hensch leads a team of seven herd veterinarians in addition to the company’s animal care and veterinary technicians. She has ultimate responsibility for 175,000 sows at over 60 farms across seven states.

“I was able to find something I was truly passionate about,” Hensch says. “I love teaching and working with people and that’s what I’m doing every day.

“I get my rewards by seeing others be successful and developing people. That’s the core of what I do.”

One of the ways Hensch teaches and works with people is getting out of the office and working directly with pigs. She doesn’t want to be known as strictly an office veterinarian.

“It’s important to me to get out into the field and into the barn at least one or two days a week,” she said. “I love those days. It’s fun. It’s easy. It’s what I’m trained to do.”

But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t enjoy the other aspects of her job. The Maschhoffs is a broad operation, with everything from feed mills to truck washes and other support areas included on the farms.

It’s that broader operational scale Hensch enjoys about her job and the opportunity to make a difference in the world.

“We’re providing food for the world here,” she said, “safe and affordable food.”

Small Town Vet

She didn’t know a combine from a cultivator. Her parents thought she was crazy.

Yet Dr. Elizabeth Harriman Hill took the plunge and opened up her own veterinary clinic in small town Iowa right after graduating from the College of Veterinary Medicine.

Oh, did we mention Hill is a Maine native and lived in Boston for several years and had never set foot in Iowa before coming to Ames to attend vet school.

“I met my husband in the middle of my third year and by the time graduation was nearing we knew we were going to be together and stay in Iowa,” Hill said.

Hill’s husband was a farmer from the Ellsworth, Iowa, area. When she began to seek veterinary employment, nothing was available.

“At the time, the job market was pretty saturated for veterinarians,” she said. “There was not much out there in the part of the state where I was going to live.”

Sometime during her job search, it was suggested that maybe Eldora, Iowa, might be a possibility. The community of 2,500 didn’t have a local veterinarian. Hill did her due diligence, speaking with the economic development office, the town’s mayor and others before deciding to open a clinic in Eldora.

Another veterinarian had operated a clinic in Eldora previously but it had been closed for years. The building was still empty but it lacked any equipment although there were dog runs and cages for boarding animals.

“I started out slow,” Hill recalls. “I think we only had eight appointments that first day. Now that would be a bad, slow day.”

Word of mouth brought a steady growth of clients and patients to the Eldora Veterinary Care. Hill primarily sees just dogs and cats, although on the day of this interview she did her first bunny spay.

Looking back, she admits she really didn’t know what she was doing and maybe her parents were right when they thought she was a little crazy to start her own business right out of school.

“I had never worked in a veterinary clinic by myself before,” she said. “I had a lot of questions and my classmates came in real handy.

“I’m super glad I started this business, but sometimes I wonder what I was thinking.”

And while the Maine native misses her home state, she’s more than happy with her choice to reside and work in small town Iowa.

“I just love Eldora,” she said. “I walk through town and know pretty much everybody. Being a part of this community is fantastic.

I love how my small-town life has worked out.”

In Memoriam

Kimberly Bebar (1983-2014)
Dr. Kimberly Bebar loved being a veterinarian. Family and friends remember Kim being driven in her desire to joining the profession.

“Thinking back, we believe Kim wanted to be a vet since she was in the second grade,” her parents, Rick and Rita Bebar said. “She knew what she wanted to be and stuck with it.”

Classmate Dr. Claire Dorniden Hotvet also remembers that drive.

“Kim was such a passionate individual both in becoming a veterinarian and in friendship,” Hotvet said. “As a student, we would have endless study sessions in her trailer. As a friend, she always let me borrow her puppy, Razi, to protect me on my night time runs.”

As an undergraduate student at Iowa State, Kim began working as a vet tech at an emergency clinic in Des Moines. Hotvet recalls she continued her association with the clinic, traveling to Des Moines as often as she could.

"I remember going with her to work at the emergency clinic in Des Moines and she was so excited to show me as much as she could about emergency medicine," said Dr. Caitlyn Glick, another classmate. "She wanted everyone to love ECC as much as she did."

During her vet studies, she was the founder and president of the Emergency Club where she coordinated wet labs and brought in guest speakers.

After graduating from Iowa State with her DVM, Kim was an intern at Angell Animal Medical Center in Boston in the emergency department. She was completing a residency in critical care at Cape Cod Veterinary Specialists in Massachusetts when she passed away on March 11, 2014, as a result of an automobile accident.

Massachusetts colleagues describe Kim as “an incredible teacher who left everyone with more knowledge and confidence in their abilities to help out in a crisis.”

In a memoriam written after her passing, the doctors at Cape Cod Veterinary Specialists wrote this… “Though the time she was able to dedicate to this specialty was senselessly fleeting, the impact she made at our facility and in our referring community will be long remembered.”

In particular Kim was interested in CPR and the RECOVER initiative. She was instrumental in leading a CPR teaching course for not only her co-workers at Cape Cod Veterinary Specialists but for countless veterinarians and technicians from nearby hospitals.

“Kim like to be challenged and never backed down from any challenge,” her parents said. “She had a great gut instinct and was quick thinking on her feet.”

The Bebars cherish the many testimonials they received after Kim’s passing from clients.

“They talked about how good and caring Kim was treating their pet but also how good she was at explaining things to them,” the Bebars said. “Kim never took no for an answer, she pushed ahead when others paused. She kept driving for her goal."

"Kim had so much more to offer this world," Glick said. "But those who knew her, know how big of an impact she had on everyone around her."

Veterinarian Hero

She may not know every member of the Class of 2010, but it seems like all of Dr. Katherine Polak’s classmates know about her.

When a 2010 graduate was approached about this project, they would say something similar to…“you have to talk to Katherine Polak. She’s doing amazing work.”

It’s hard not to be impressed with what Polak has accomplished in the decade since graduating from Iowa State. She has wasted no time putting her DVM degree to meaningful use.

Polak works for the charity FOUR PAWS International, managing its companion animal work in Southeast Asia from her home base in Bangkok, Thailand. In this role, she developed and launched a regional partnership program which aids local animal welfare groups, trains local veterinarians, and operates community engagement programs.

“When I started, FOUR PAWS had only operated stray animal programs in Eastern Europe, so work in Southeast Asia was completely new for the organization,” Polak said. “I had the unique opportunity to help craft a regional strategy and launch a program designed to help capacity build local animal welfare charities who really needed help.”

She combats poor veterinary training and the lack of government interest in animal welfare. There is rampant pet abandonment in Southeast Asia and a lack of spay neuter services.

Polak tailors the programs to the local situation. In Cambodia and Thailand, she goes up against a huge animal welfare issue by working with local governments and providing care to animals at Buddhist pagodas and underserved communities. Veterinary training is also incorporated into programs. In Vietnam, “Cats Matter Too” provides free spay/neuter and medical care for thousands of cats in Vietnam in addition to educational programs for children.

“These programs are so desperately needed given the significant suffering of companion animals in much of Southeast Asia,” Polak said.

But the program’s most notable focus is on the cruel dog and cat meat trade in Indonesia, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Under Polak’s direction, FOUR PAWS launched an international campaign to end the cat and dog meat trade in these countries. She manages the on-the-ground operations, investigations, as well as local activities and lobbying.

FOUR PAWS has established an international transport/adoption program for rescued dogs, transporting them from Phnom Penh, Cambodia to Boston and Los Angeles for re-homing. In 2019, the organization was successful in shutting down a dog slaughterhouse in Cambodia, which was responsible for killing over 2,000 dogs a year. Since then, she has helped shut down three more slaughterhouses, one of which killed more than one million dogs since opening.

“Our first closing took months and months of planning, determining a livelihood conversion opportunity for the slaughterhouse owner, and then finally rescuing dogs,” Polak said. “It was so incredible to save them from an imminent death, but also help the slaughterhouse owner and his family who really didn’t want to be killing dogs for a living.”

She also manages FOUR PAWS undercover investigations. That means visiting dog and cat markets, slaughterhouses and restaurants.

“The cruelty there is unimaginable,” Polak says. “Seeing the drowning, hanging, stabbing and blowtorching of companion animals is heartbreaking and it can be difficult and so emotionally exhausting.

“But the progress made is also incredible. In July 2020, we were able to secure the first-ever ban on the dog meat trade in Siem Reap, Cambodia.”

These experiences have cemented Polak’s long-time passion for helping underserved animals. After graduating from Iowa State, she completed an internship in shelter medicine and surgery at Colorado State followed by a residency at the University of Florida.

But her passion was really cultivated at Iowa State during the Summer Scholars program. Polak was assigned to work with Dr. Claudia Baldwin on feline respiratory infections in shelter cats and Polak spent the summer at the Ames and Boone County Humane Society.

“I was shocked by the number of healthy animals being euthanized,” she said. “That really struck a chord with me how dysfunctional in many ways the sheltering systems was back then, and how little resources there were for shelters to work with and improve their practices.”

After her residency, Polak served as the medical director at Soi Dog Foundation in Thailand, where she trained local veterinarians and launched a program in Bangkok to neuter upwards of 80,000 dogs per year.

Her humanitarian work hasn’t been limited to Southeast Asia. She is the founding medical director of the Spayathon for Puerto Rico with the Humane Society of the United States. This groundbreaking initiative has a goal of neutering more than 85,000 dogs and cats over a three-year period.

For her efforts, Polak has been honored, and honored a lot. In 2019, she was named the Association of Shelter Veterinarians’ Veterinarian of the Year. The American Humane Society named Polak its Hero Veterinarian of the Year in 2020, an honor that was presented on the Hallmark Channel for the world to celebrate.

And this past fall, the Iowa State University Alumni Association awarded her its Alumni Humanitarian Award. The award, established in 1932, annually recognizes ISU alumni outstanding contributions to human welfare that transcend purely professional accomplishments.

“Improving animal welfare is central to my philosophy as both a person and veterinarian,” Polak said. “I’m really fortunate to have the opportunity to try to create sustainable change for animal welfare in an area of the world where there aren’t many resources for animals, particularly strays.”

A Family of Veterinarians

Several members of the Class of 2010 grew up with a parent who was a veterinarian, paving the way for their own chosen career path.

And there are multiple veterinarian couples in the class, who not only graduated in 2010, but who were soon married.

But there are few families like the Hoffmanns, who not only have dual veterinary degrees, but whose fathers were also veterinarians.

“Annette (the couple’s daughter) probably isn’t going to have much of a choice on her career since both of us and both her grandfathers are vets,” said Dr. Pat Hoffmann.

Pat, along with his wife, Dr. Kate (Baker) Hoffmann own and operate the Atlantic (Iowa) Animal Health Center. In reality, Kate is the sole proprietor of the clinic since Pat is a veterinarian and swine technical consultant at Elanco.

“I mow the yard and change the light bulbs, but I don’t see any patients here,” Pat said. “If Kate has a difficult surgery, I will sometimes assist her.”

Kate just shakes her head, asking her husband, “when was the last time you assisted me in surgery?”

Even though they are in the same profession, the couple has pretty much gone their separate way after graduation. Pat is a swine veterinarian. Kate started out as a mixed animal practitioner, focusing on cows, but now just sees small animals at her clinic.

That was the case right after graduation when both were employed at Southern Hills Veterinary Services, a multi-office clinic in several southwest Iowa communities.

“We both practiced there for two years,” Kate said, “but they didn’t have us in the same office on the same day. I think that was even more challenging than if we would have been able to work together.

“We always seemed to be going in different directions all the time. One week I would be on call, then the next Pat would be. It’s nicer now that we’re in different areas.”

When the opportunity came in 2014 to purchase the Atlantic Animal Health Center, the couple jumped at it.

Then another challenge.

“We learned I was pregnant right before we bought the clinic,” Kate said, “and Pat had to work all that time I was on maternity leave.”

Kate says the timing of her pregnancy was great. Her new clients saw her not only as a veterinarian but a soon-to-be mother.

“It was a blessing to start the practice where people could see I was going to be a mother,” she said. “I think my clients have really appreciated the fact I not only care for their pets but I also care for our daughter as well.”

As essentially a sole practitioner, Kate finds the wide array of medical procedures she performs on a weekly basis challenging. She says she has particularly begun to appreciate surgery, and internal medicine is a favorite specialty to practice.

Since leaving his first practice, Pat has focused his career path on swine medicine, working first for Genesus, Inc., then as director of health assurance for DNA Swine Genetics, and now with Elanco. His territory covers what he calls the “Western Corn Belt” of the Dakotas, Nebraska, Minnesota and Iowa.

Swine medicine was probably always in Pat’s future. His father, Dr. James Hoffmann (’82), partnered with legendary swine veterinarian Dr. Roy Schultz (’60) and growing up Pat would tag along.

“I had a great backseat view of a lot of cool things that were happening in the ‘90s in swine medicine,” Pat said. “What I learned from Dad and Roy helped develop my passion to help feed the growing global population without destroying the planet.

“When the opportunity to work exclusively in swine medicine came about, I couldn’t pass it up. You just never know what path your career will take.”