All in the Family

The Tri-Valley Veterinary Clinic in Miller, Nebraska, is strictly a family affair.

The mixed animal practice was started in 1975 by Dr. Michael Saathoff after he graduated from Iowa State’s College of Veterinary Medicine. It remained a one-person practice until Saathoff’s son Andrew also graduated from Iowa State in 2010.

“He needed another veterinarian in the practice with him earlier, but waited until I was done with school so I could join and practice with him,” Andrew said. “We work side by side many days in addition to farming and owning cattle together.

“There isn’t a day I don’t talk to him or most likely see him and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Both Drs. Saathoff aren’t the only family members involved with the Tri-Valley Veterinary Clinic. Andrew’s mother keeps the clinic’s books and his brother is the practice’s vet tech. Tri-Valley is a mixed animal practice but Andrew estimates about 80 percent of the practice is large animals, primarily cow-calf and feedlots.

“This is very much a family business,” Andrew said.

Long before he became a veterinary student at Iowa State, Andrew knew where his career path would take him. The elder Saathoff started the practice as a mobile business before building a small animal clinic in 1985 followed by a large animal clinic a decade later.

Andrew fondly remembers the two-way radio that was in the family kitchen his father would use to call home to see if there were any other vet calls to go on. On many of those calls, Andrew would tag along with his father.

“I traveled with him as often as I could as a child and then worked for him as I got older,” Andrew said. “I remember many times going out in the middle of the night to pull a calf or do a C-section on a cow.

“I helped with every surgery I could and can remember holding the forceps or dabbing the incision site to wipe away the blood. I always loved helping the animals but also helping the people.”

Andrew’s early and vast experiences out in the field came in handy when he first joined his father’s practice right after graduation. One of his first C-sections on a cow was a schistosomes reflexes calf (he calls it an inside outside calf).

The uterus wouldn’t come out. It was hot and Andrew spent 2 ½ hours sewing up the uterus.

“It was a terrible surgery,” he said. “I told the clients when I was done that I did my best but most likely the cow would die.

“The next fall when I pregnancy checked the cows in that herd, that cow was pregnant and doing just fine. I felt like I had failed but, in the end, it was a success.”

A Direct Career Path

A mission trip to Honduras during her undergraduate studies at St. Cloud State University set Claire Dorniden Hotvet on a collision course with her future career path.

“While I was on this trip I saw the benefits and consequences of living in close quarters with animals,” Hotvet said.

She had a specific plan in mind before even entering veterinary school at Iowa State by enrolling in a dual DVM-Masters in Public Health at the University of Minnesota. She took a food safety course with a focus on food-related and zoonotic-based disease outbreaks and the programs which combat food safety and zoonotic concerns.

During her fourth year rotations, Hotvet participated in a USDA-APHIS externship.

“I was introduced to some passionate public health veterinarians with the Food Safety and Inspective Service (FSIS),” she said. “They opened my eyes to the many aspects of their career related to food safety, public health and the humane handling of livestock.”

Yet Hotvet didn’t start out with the FSIS. She began her work with the USDA as a relief supervisory public health veterinarian. There she would fill in vacant positions and those needing relief. Every week she traveled to a different location, dealing with food safety and public health.

Then in 2015 she landed a gig as a district veterinary medical specialist with the USDA-FSIS.

For the past seven years, Hotvet has been part of a passionate team of veterinarians and inspectors. One day you could find her working in a large livestock establishment to help improve the handling of livestock. A day later she may be at a small meat locker. 

“I have a wide variety of roles within the agency,” Hotvet said. “It keeps me on my toes and is very rewarding.”

She works out of the Des Moines district which covers five states including Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin and Iowa working with both swine and poultry facilities. Included in her district are the number one swine state – Iowa – and the number one turkey state – Minnesota.

One of her prime responsibilities is to ensure the establishments she works with practice proper animal handling.

“This is essential for good animal husbandry, increased quality of meat, and better staff morale,” Hotvet said. “It is our responsibility to treat the animal we harvest for food humanely.

“Ever since I can remember, I wanted to be a veterinarian and the passion I had growing up with animals and trying to ‘save’ them all transitioned into this important career path.”

California Dreaming

The plan all along was to spend a year, maybe two, in Sacramento, complete her small animal rotating internship and move back to Iowa.

After all Dr. Kendra O’Connor and her husband, were both Des Moines natives. Their families all lived in Iowa.

But Northern California and its mountains, ocean, outdoor recreation, wine country and new restaurants were just too hard to resist, so more than a decade after O’Connor interned at the VCA Sacramento Veterinary Referral Center, she is still seeing patients at the clinic.

“We haven’t closed the door on coming back at some point, but Iowa winters surely are a deterrent, especially now that we are ‘weak’ Californians,” she said.

After completing her internship, O’Connor joined another VCA hospital in Sacramento, working there for a couple of years before going back to VCA Sacramento Veterinary Referral Center. There she is working over nights as an emergency veterinarian with specialties in trauma, toxicities and metabolic disorders.

Nightly, she sees all kinds of cases, everything from trauma from accidents, GI upset, chronic illnesses getting worse, and severe illness transferred for specialty care.

“I see dogs with vomiting and diarrhea everyday but otherwise anything could walk in the door,” O’Connor said. “I enjoy the rush of having to quickly solve problems, or at least do the best you can.

“I know emergency medicine is easy to look at as something stressful, but at the end of the day, or in my case, the night, I can walk away from my cases. Chronic case management and becoming attached to specific clients and pets would be hard for me and I have so much respect for my colleagues who excel at this.”

Toxicity cases are frequent admittances at O’Connor’s clinic. There are the common poisons – chocolate, grapes, raisins, rat poison and carprofen for dogs, and lilies and pyrethrin for cats. Northern California is also home to some plants that cause a variety of issues in companion animals.

O’Connor says she sees quite a few rattlesnake bite cases each summer. She also worked on a suspected case of salmon poisoning as well recently. The more challenging cases involve pets ingesting human medications.

Although her focus has been on dogs and cats, the wildfires that have devastated that part of California has taken her in another direction.

“I have been volunteering at a local wildlife clinic and am learning as much as I can, although so far I have only worked with some birds and small mammals,” O’Connor said. “I hope to be able to offer help in whatever capacity I can when the call comes.”