Episode #29 – Mark Cushing

Welcome to the People of Animal Health Podcast. The host of our podcast is Stacy Pursell. Stacy is the leading executive recruiter for the animal health industry and the veterinary profession. She’s the founder of Therio Partners and The Vet Recruiter. Stacy has placed more professionals in key positions within the animal health industry and the veterinary profession than any executive search professional. Along the way, Stacy has built relationships with some outstanding people who are doing incredible things to make a difference. The People of Animal Health Podcast features industry leaders and trailblazers who have made a significant impact or are making an impact in the animal industry or the veterinary profession. Stacy chats with them to learn more about their lives, their careers, and the unique and interesting things that they have done to contribute to the animal health industry or veterinary profession. She’s here to share their stories with you. Now here’s the host of our podcast, Stacy Pursell.

Welcome to the People of Animal Health podcast. On today’s show, we are talking with Mark Cushing, an attorney and the founder of the Animal Policy Group and author of the book Pet Nation. Since 2004, Mark has specialized in animal health, animal welfare, veterinary and veterinary educational issues and accreditation. Developing a cutting edge practice across these sectors, he currently leads several industry coalitions and initiatives.

Mark has guided successful accreditations for a growing list of veterinary colleges and is a co-founder of the Veterinary Virtual Care Association. Mark has recently written Pet Nation, a book that tells the inside story of how companion animals are transforming our homes, culture and economy. Mark is a frequent speaker at Veterinary Medicine and other animal policy related conferences. Mark and I just saw each other last week in Denver where he was on a panel for Vet Partners. Mark is an adjunct faculty member at Lincoln Memorial, Lewis and Clark, and University of Oregon Law Schools. He is a past chair of government relations practices at Tonkon Torp, a prominent northeast law firm and Winstead Seacrest & Minick, a major Texas law firm. Mark also serves as trustees counsel at Lincoln Memorial University. He is an honors graduate with distinction from Stanford University and the Willamette University College of Law. Welcome onto the People of Animal Health Podcast. And how are you, Mark?

Doing great. It’s Friday, a lovely scorched day here in Arizona and got my five-mile walk in early before the temperatures got beyond 95. So I’m doing great and congratulations-

Yeah, I was talking to you-

Your new show.

Yeah, thank you. Thanks, Mark. I was talking to you the other day and you were doing your five-mile walk. That’s impressive. And I know you have to get up early to do that in Arizona ’cause it is so hot there, especially in the summer. Well, Mark, I’m so excited to have you on our show today and I know that you’ve had a super successful career and you’re involved in so many interesting things, but I’d love to start off at the bottom and at the very beginning of your career. But first of all, what was your life like growing up and where did you grow up?

So I was the fourth of five kids in a town, at the time, a sleepy country town west of Portland, Oregon called McMinnville, named for McMinnville, Tennessee. And it was your basic fun baby boomer childhood, a lot of freedom and a lot of competition with my siblings. The town since interesting has become one of America’s highly rated small towns because it’s the center of the pinot noir wine industry in Oregon, which has become a two to three billion dollar industry.

And my county and that town and area and farms that grew up working on and so forth is now cool and stylish. And I went to a reunion last year and really had to laugh because it’s just like your town going from black and white TV to color. I couldn’t get over how interesting my little town was. But I had a great time and played sports and did politics and enjoyed school and getting in trouble and all the things one did as a kid with a lot of freedom. One doesn’t have that much freedom these days. I have five kids of my own, so it’s interesting to compare that. But that’s where I grew up.

I was going to say, so you were four or five kids, you have five kids. I knew that because you told me that, and I have five kids, so how interesting is that? Well, sounds like you had a really neat childhood and were involved in a variety of different things there and how neat that the town has reinvented itself today. Well, I’m curious, when did you first figure out what you wanted to do professionally?

Well, I had two paths in mind and you never know whether they were your own idea or what friends and family thought. But everybody in my family and most of my friends growing up assumed I grew up to be a politician. I was super active politically and ran for things and tended to be president of different organizations and student bodies and things like that. And I was elected to Oregon Boys State governor, which is what Bill Clinton did in Arkansas, and that launched his political career. So that was one path I thought about early on. But I always knew I’d be a lawyer. My father was a lawyer, my older brother was a lawyer. I liked to argue, still do, and was pretty good at it. So I never doubted that I’d go to law school. And so those were really the two paths I imagined when I went off to Stanford after high school.

And then that was a tremendous academic and cultural and social experience. And if you’re not changed by college, you aren’t paying attention. So I came out of college and taught for a year at a Jesuit prep school in Los Angeles and coached basketball. Came up, ran a governor’s campaign in Oregon and I saw firsthand the life of a politician and decided early on that I wasn’t going to go down that path. So I then jumped into law school. and we can talk about that, but that’s what I looked towards doing in high school and in college.

Yeah, my son Andy just graduated from high school and he’s going to college this fall, University of Oklahoma, and he’s going to get a degree in business, but he wants to go to law school. So I know he’s going to be very interested to hear this podcast.

Great.

Well, tell me about the beginnings of your career. You graduated you taught, you also taught basketball, but how did you get started at the beginning of your career and tell us more about that.

Well, I wanted to take a couple years off before law school. So I’d done an honors thesis at Stanford that connected me to a Jesuit faculty member at Santa Clara University just down the street from Stanford. And Loyola Prep in LA wanted to have more students get into Stanford. So, believe it or not, I think it’s the hardest job I ever had. I taught medieval and renaissance history, which is my specialty in college to high school sophomores in LA. And let tell you that that’s hard work because there’s no interest on the part of a sophomore boy in Los Angeles at any era, certainly at that era, in medieval renaissance history. So I’ve always said that my first job was literally the most demanding one and I don’t know what grade I’d give myself. I’m sure it wouldn’t be an A, hopefully at least a B, but it was challenging.

Then I went back to Oregon and had a chance to run a state legislative and then a governor’s campaign with a good friend who became a congressional leader later and that was enjoyable. I like to test myself that those people that know me well know that I like challenges, still do multi-decade later. But I went to law school and there’s a national competition for law students all over the country called Mock Trial where you, you’re in a simulated trial. And I made it to the national finals in Houston and got a very commanding offer at the time, Stacy, from a big Houston law firm. And my then wife and I had a baby a month before law school ended. So that made sense. She was from Tulsa by the way. I know you’re in Oklahoman. She went to [inaudible 00:08:50].

Everybody has a connection to Tulsa it seems.

I think so. There’s that song by Gary or Bob Wilson, the Texas Playboys, take me back to Tulsa, I’m too young to marry. I went to Houston and took the bar, came licensed in Texas, but the firm broke up, a big firm and it broke up right before I got there. So the litigation group, I was going there to become a trial lawyer, they left and created a boutique and didn’t need any young lawyers. So there wasn’t much to do. And I was an inpatient ready to go trial lawyer. So I went back to Oregon, took a 50% pay cut four months into my career and went back to Oregon with now five month old baby. And if I think back about that decision, but it’s probably typical of me, I tend to take on challenges and not be afraid of risks, which that was a very risk heavy decision.

But it was great because I spent 18 months, almost tried a case a week, or excuse me, case a month. So I was in court doing what I wanted to do on the civil side business cases, not personal injury or criminal. And it put me on display, if you will, for some major law firms in Portland that I tried cases alongside. And I got offers from five of the biggest firms in Portland to join them and did that and that launched about a 12-year career. And I couldn’t have been happier. And I tried cases all the time. I was in federal court, state court, and my specialty, it probably wouldn’t surprise you because I like people, what I liked were jury cases. And most lawyers don’t like jury cases because they’re so unpredictable. It’s 12 strangers, you don’t know what they’re going to do.

You’ve got a client that’s either if you’re a criminal lawyer at risk for their freedom. If you’re a business lawyer, a lot of money at stake, whether you’re trying to get the money or not pay the money. And I just loved jury cases. There was something about them that was so live and real and particularly just so challenging because you had to figure out a way to convince 12 strangers that you’ve never met, you’ll never meet again, to do the right thing by my client. And I was happy to do that the rest of my life. And I shot up the ladder in Portland as a young hotshot trial lawyer, quite a few cases in the newspaper and thought that’s what was going to continue to happen. And I got involved and was the lead strategist for a governor’s campaign for candidate for governor in Oregon and he won.

And that changed everything. We wouldn’t be doing this podcast if that hadn’t happened. And I didn’t get paid to do that. It was a civic cultural thing to do and it got my name out there too, I suppose. But I started getting phone calls to handle political and lobbying issues for clients who figured I was close to the governor and I was probably the smart person to hire and I hired lobbyists. I didn’t want to give up my trial law career. But at the same time, cases were increasingly being mediated, arbitrated, which is where you sit in a conference room with a lawyer serving as a private judge because general counsel for clients increasingly wouldn’t trust jury cases. They just didn’t want to risk the money and the reputational damage of 12 strangers. How could you count on them to make a good decision? Even though I had a really good track record.

So I saw the future, Stacy, turns out I was relatively accurate in what I’ve predicted that I would instead of being in front of a jury, I’d be in a lawyer’s conference room having a lawyer play judge. Not nearly as much fun or nearly as interesting. So that led me. I had a lobbying success on a very controversial form of lottery in Oregon, barely kept the governor from vetoing it. And that took me into running a company in Atlanta, a client company. I jumped out of the law. And again, typical, I thought, “Let me see if I can do this. Let me see if I’m any good at running a company.” And it was involved with state governments all over the country. So the nature of the business was somewhat political, which obviously carries through to today. So moved to Atlanta, we had our last child there at the famous North Side Hospital, which Designing Women, I think that was a show, a southern based show that was super popular back then and that was the hospital.

I grew up watching that show.

There you go. And that was the hospital they’d always referred to that you needed to be born in Atlanta. It was the closest one. We didn’t pick it for popularity. But anyway, so I did that and ultimately ended up in Washington, DC as a partner in a large Texas law firm that a close friend of mine was joining. And we’d met at that mock trial national finals back in Houston in the day. And he was a very prominent Black Texas lawyer, first Black student body president at Texas A and M, and he was senior advisor to the first president Bush, the father, and the Texas Senator John Tower before that. So we opened the DC office of a Texas firm. And I was a lawyer lobbyist in DC, which has about 75,000 people with that title, and mainly build a client base, Stacy, of Canadian companies.

I had a lot of success in Quebec, in Montreal, and so Canada as you know lives off of the US and most Canadian governments and businesses have ties. So that was an interesting change, built that practice. It was going well. And I was catching a flight from Ottawa, the capital of Canada to fly back to Washington DC and I got a call on my cell phone, which was probably about a 10 pound phone at the time. It was back in that era in 2005 or ’06 from the CEO and founder of Banfield Pet Hospitals of about which you know a great deal and his legal counsel. And they had formerly been my firm in Portland, Oregon. And they asked me could I possibly solve a problem in Congress for the pet industry regarding microchipping of pets? And we could talk about that if you want.

But that was my entry into the pet healthcare, animal health world, which I’ve been happily submerged in for 17 years now and I never saw it coming and we were successful, so that success often brings more phone calls. But I figured that was it. I had a good time, got a nice fee out of it, move on with my career. And the phone kept ringing and pulling me into an opportunity.

So I represented Banfield in all 43 states that they were in with state vet med boards and legislatures. And they were a very much of a progressive, innovative, renegade company, not everybody’s favorite veterinary practice at the time. So that was quite a good experience. And then that took me, the door kept opening to accredit Roche University and then I had a celebrated accreditation battle for the National University of Mexico, which was turned down by the AVMA, and I got that decision reversed. I wasn’t involved in that stage, but they called me after they were turned down. It was really an embarrassing thing for the Mexican government actually. And I reversed it and got them accredited and I’d say that probably as much as anything put me on the map. That was in 2010.

You answered my next question. My question was how did you get into the animal health industry? And you just said that. But then the Mexico accreditation, I’m curious to learn more about that. How did you do that?

Well, there was a lot of controversy at that time within the AVMA and the national discourse. And you were now in the industry, so you’ll remember this about this flawed theory. People weren’t lying about it, they just were mistaken that we had too many veterinarians and there was a desire and they had a vote at the AVMA House of Delegates and they came close to prohibiting the accreditation of foreign schools. And there was also some good old-fashioned racism directed at Mexico to be honest. And so without getting too deep, the basis for turning them down was manufactured. And I’ll just say that and I’ll stand by it. So I read the report and read the decision and discovered a meeting with the university in Mexico City that the basis for turning them down was literally manufactured. So I called them out pretty bluntly and they had the good sense to reverse the decision and then I brought them back down for another limited site visit regarding the topic in question.

And they were impressed by what they saw. This is an amazing school. It’s 300,000 students, 300,000. It’s the least corrupt institution in Mexico. What do I mean by that? You only get into the school based upon your score on an entrance exam or your class standing in one of their 15 prep schools. Their charter is to be the best in every single department, every single program in all of Mexico. So it’s a prestigious school. It’s where the 1968 Olympics were held in their stadium. Their vet school has a huge faculty, very successful. Most of their faculty have PhDs from US vet schools in addition to their degree from UNAM it’s called. So really an impressive place. So if I look back, I’m not sure, there’s two other successes I’ve had in the veterinary space that meant more to me than reversing their denial.

And they had a big celebration on the whole campus. They had people, it was like a holiday, a parade. They brought me down for that day. The president of the university spoke, leading members of the Mexican Congress and government came. It was a huge celebration. It was a lot of fun. So long time, good friendships there. And that I think submitted in people’s minds that cared about this, that if you, based upon Roche University and UNAM, if you wanted to start a new school or get a first time accreditation, I was someone to consider retaining. So then Lincoln Memorial called me back in 2011. And we can talk about that if you’d like, but I’ll let you get a chance to get a word in here.

Well, I know that you’re very involved with the veterinary schools and the accreditation process, and I know you’re also in the process of working to help get new veterinary schools started. So I’d love if you would share with our listeners about some of those projects that you’re up to and some of the current work that you’re doing throughout the veterinary profession.

So Lincoln Memorial or LMU at shorthand is a private nonprofit university in the Cumberland Gap, a very remote part of Appalachia in eastern Tennessee. And most people, myself included, had never even heard of the school. And a very dynamic graduate of theirs became board chairman, Pete DeBusk. And after he built a successful global medical device and supply company, he turned his attention to rebuilding and reshaping the school. So he heard about my successes and we met, and I’ve worked with him since 2011. And it was a challenge because it was a part of the country that most people looking at it thought, “How could you afford a vet school? We don’t need one. You’re an Appalachia, it’s very high level of poverty, human sickness and challenges.” And there was almost a presumption that farmers and people of Appalachia couldn’t afford vets, didn’t need veterinarians.

So we built there, got accredited and opened the school in 2014. And that was the first time I started a school and I didn’t do it obviously by myself, but I was a consultant that did that. And that was exciting. So we were accredited and from the very first graduating class in 2018, Stacy, this little known school has had the highest starting salaries of any school in the country. And what was the secret there was that the final year, the 12 months of what you call your clinical year, was spent in 11 different rotations of four weeks each, basically in private practices around the US. And they served like auditions and so practices that needed vets would meet, and you know that world so well. They would meet these students in rotations that used to be two weeks long. And now these were four weeks. We designed it so that it wasn’t just come in week one, say hi and say goodbye the next week.

And so they watched how you work, they watched your work habits, they saw if you were talented or not, and they watched how you communicated to clients, sometimes about painful euthanasia decisions, fee disputes, how you work with vet techs, other doctors. And the LMU kids just scored off the charts. So before you left on your rotation, they’d say, “Stacy, you ever thought about living in whatever town they were in?” And they’d put an offer on the table for you. Well, you’d go to four more rotations, you’d probably have three, maybe four more offers. So it became very competitive and it really taught me the value of the distributed model. In no way am I criticizing the value of the teaching hospitals based on large land-grant campuses. They do a good job too. But there’s a unique quality to the distributed model where you’re in practices and it’s much more hands-on for the students.

So you show more of what your talents are and your talents have a lot less to do with what your grade one average is and much more with your people skills and your medical skills in practice in reality. So that’s been fun. That led to being retained here in Arizona where I live, I didn’t live here at the time, by the University of Arizona, prestigious research university, who was turned down in 2016 by the AVMA accrediting body, the Council on Education. Very embarrassing for the university. It had never happened to a University of Arizona program or school. And they brought me in to look at it, again based upon success I’d had before. And that was exciting. And in 2019, well I helped convince the Board of Regents in Arizona to not give up and we jumped in. We hired a great first dean, Julie Funk from Michigan State, and we were successful in 2019 and got accredited. And the first graduating class is next month in August of 2023. So that was exciting.

And then I got hired by schools that were on probation. And so I developed a part of my practice in the Animal Policy Group related to accreditation. And they usually involved an innovative approach to the curriculum and what Arizona added, they took the distributed model that Lincoln Memorial and Western have done so well with, and we added turning the program from four years to three years. That doesn’t limit or reduce the amount of academic time. Vet schools are nine semesters, but most schools, really all schools up until then, took the first two summers off, which used to have more value. But they decided students don’t want to be students anymore, they want to be veterinarians, let’s get them in the workforce earlier. It’s proved to be very popular. So that was an innovation which I’m now convinced is a great way to go.

So today here on what is the 21st of July, I’m the consultant and involved up to the top of my head with starting five new schools. So at the same time, which is challenging but exciting and blending the models we just talked about. And so that’s what I’m doing now, but I’ve been busy with lots of other things besides higher ed and accreditation, as you know.

Well you have been, and you also recently wrote a book, Pet Nation. What inspired you to write it?

Well, it was a phone call from an agent who had reason to believe and turned out to be accurate that Penguin Random House and some other large publishers, but ended up being Penguin Random House, that published a book was interested. And this was in 2018, the spring of ’18. And we had moved to Paradise Valley right next to Scottsdale in Arizona. My wife chairs anatomy and histology and the curriculum at Mayo Clinic’s Medical School here in Arizona. And I had watched as you had, we both had front row seats, you very much same as I did, on the transformation since really I would term it the late nineties and certainly full steam by the 2000, the complete transformation of the role of pets in American families, homes, culture and society, and tremendous economic impact because of that.

The phrase I use a lot and people use a lot is pets went from the backyard to the bedroom. But they didn’t become the new kids, but I joke and say that pets are better than kids. I have five kids, they hate it when I say that, but pets as we know are so nice. But in any event, pets became central members of families, not children obviously, but central members. They sleep on top of the bed, they go on vacations with you, they don’t sleep in the backyard. And so many changes, just order of magnitude changes, flowed from that where pets could go, where you see pets. You can’t go shopping and not see pets. You can’t go to an outdoor restaurant and not see pets. Go on a train, you go on a plane, you go to a hospital, every hospital has dogs participating as animal assisted therapy dogs. So the whole culture changed and nobody had written, nobody had studied that, and nobody had tried to write a book about that.

So I took that on. What happened, how did it happen? Why did it happen? What was the impact? What have been the problems? What have been the political issues? That’s my world very much. How has it affected pet healthcare? Chapter Seven. I even take on the Pope, which upset my Irish Catholic mother very much, who really challenges the ownership of pets and thinks that it’s a waste of people’s time and emotions. So it’s a broad wide-reaching book. And Pet Nation was used the way we talk about [inaudible 00:29:59] Nation or Cowboy Nation, the fans of sports teams. But it’s chock-full of data and I’ve had a lot of fun writing it. I’ve had so many people that read it or listened to it on the audio version and said, “I thought I knew everything about PetSmart, but I didn’t apparently know anything.”

So I tried to really lay it out there and it was time-consuming, but it was fun to write. I like to write. I think of myself as a good writer. Lawyers write a lot, so it’s always been part of my work life. And enjoyed it and I’m sure it’s helped my career just because getting a book out there that your industry and the people in the world that you work can read. I’m not going to ask you if you’ve read it, but if you haven’t I’ll sign one and send it to you. But it’s been a lot of fun. So that’s the story of that book.

I love that story. And you talked about some of the transitions since the nineties with pets, but since your time in the animal health industry or the veterinary profession, what’s been the most surprising thing that you’ve seen throughout career so far in this space?

The single most surprising thing I spent quite a bit of time on, but there’s a number of candidates, but the single most surprising thing, Stacy, was the decision of Subaru and Nissan in the nineties. And I can’t even imagine the creativity of the CEO of both those global car manufacturers that approved this because they launched TV commercials. So TV advertising, very expensive as we know. And the ads you’ll recall was a car going down a highway of a California coastline with the windows down. And in the passenger seat was a German Shepherd, not German Shepherd, a Golden Retriever, hair flowing in the wind, smiling and that’s all you saw. They didn’t tell you about the car, the engine mileage, nothing. And I’ve often speculated that the CEOs who ultimately sign off on these big commercial campaigns must have looked at this and said, “So where’s the rest of the ad? We’re selling cars here.”

And the ad companies had the genius and saw what was happening to say, “You just saw it. We want to connect your brand to a dog. Okay? That’s what we’re doing here. People love dogs.” And both companies just saw their sales spike. They took off. There was no question that they were onto something. So that in many ways, and now I remember, do you remember a couple years ago the Hyundai Christmas commercials, five silver Hyundais of different sizes from the biggest to the smallest lined up and in front of them five dogs from the biggest to the smallest. And all they wanted you to do was look at the dogs. They didn’t care if you looked at the cars, they just wanted you to look at the dogs and feel good and go, “Oh honey, doesn’t that look like our dog?”So that was number one. I still say that was the greatest surprise.

The second greatest is a favorite story of mine. I remember easily into the nineties, if you walked into a hotel lobby with a dog, unless it was truly a service dog or you were blind and you had a dog, but if you walked into a hotel lobby with a dog just walked in, a bellman would come over and say, “Hey Stacy, please no dogs inside.” If you walked up to the counter, had the dog in your arms and said, “My name’s Cushing and I’ve got a room.” They’d say, “Wait a second, what’s that dog doing here?” Now we have hotel groups, Marriott all over the place, Kimpton Hotels is the one I get the biggest kick out of. They have special floors for people who don’t like dogs. So we’ve gone so far that the entire hotel is dog friendly every way, shape or form. But you go to the seventh floor on the west wing if you don’t like dogs and you can be up in that room and you won’t be bothered.

So those changes which reflect that and what drove so much of that as you know, Stacy, was this device, our smartphones. Because what happened was people started taking photos as you know, and videos of their dog and posting it. And every day when you opened up your phone to see what your calendar was or see if you had any phone calls or anything, you see these incredible pictures just of regular people in regular situations with a cute dog or a cute cat. And you know what? The only word you can describe, they were irresistible. We would look at those and smile, laugh. You’d see somebody in Portland, Maine that had your species of dog that looked just like yours. You might follow up, you might connect, you may not.

So suddenly you just saw dogs in particular, cats too, but dogs more than anything, you just saw them everywhere and you began to break down the barriers to they can’t be here, they can’t be there, take that dog away, to where companies now fight for airtime to show their brand connected to a dog in some manner, even if the dog has nothing to do with a commercial. AT&T had a bearded dragon in a commercial. Come on. But it did. So those changes drove so much of it. As far as impact, the most surprising thing has been how quickly millennial and generation Z children and young adults have now become the largest pet owning group in America, replacing baby boomers, who still have a lot of dogs and generation X have plenty of dogs, but the largest cohort of pet owners are millennials and Gen Zs.

But if you think about it, they grew up in families with dogs treated differently. They saw dogs treated special and that was normal to them. And I don’t think they decided to have dogs instead of kids or cats instead of kids. But they definitely decided we’re going to have cats and dogs. And they spend money. They want the same quality and level and scale of healthcare for their pets as for themselves. That’s the driving force right now in the shortage we face to jump to that topic. But it’s just interesting here because a culturally driven change and what a great problem to have a whole new two generations want more of your services, veterinarians. But we don’t have enough. We went 30 years and opened one vet school between ’84 and 2013. And I’m not blaming anybody, but obviously we could’ve used a lot more vet schools, so what a surprise, we don’t have enough.

And you’ve got millennials and Gen Zs knocking on the door saying, “I want a lot more. I want more time, I want more advice, more counsel, more care.” So something surprising when you didn’t see it coming. And I didn’t sit there in 2006 when I got involved and have some mystical vision of what was going to happen in the next 16, 17 years. But it’s played out these dynamics that have all converged. So it’s made it a very interesting, exciting industry. You’re a leading part of it if I can throw you a compliment. The number one recruiter and you have your finger and on the pulse of the profession and the status of pets probably as much or more than anybody, I’ve been lucky enough to have a front row seat every day. I’ve got a big group of clients now, so I’m hearing, I’m looking and seeing the way things evolve and it’s almost night and day difference. Wouldn’t you agree? You go back to when you were in college compared to today, it’s almost a night and day difference I think the role of pets.

Yeah, a lot of changes. You mentioned a number of them. Looking ahead, what does your crystal ball say about the future of the animal health industry?

It should be sustainable on a constant growth path. It should get better and better. Millennials’ children are going to have probably more pets if they can than their parents did. Gen Z, same thing. People, as I say, those next generations aren’t going to say, “Skateboarding’s a lot more fun than a dog. So I’m not going to get a dog, I’m going to get a skateboard. It’s not going to happen.” So as long as we don’t blow it, as long as we don’t make a mistake. But we could make a mistake, which you and I know about and I’ll talk about it in a minute. The future should be phenomenal. It should be an industry, a profession where more and more people want in, which is what we see today, whether it’s vet techs or it’s veterinarians or pet care providers, just generally in all different fields.

So what would stop that from happening? And in my view, the greatest problem will be if the industry doesn’t embrace change and understand, every generation expects things to be different. Millennials don’t make any decision from going out to a restaurant to getting car insurance, to buying clothes without using their iPhones or their smartphones, without doing comparison shopping. You go to Yelp, you go to OpenTable, all the tools we use. And the professions that fight that and somehow think they can hold back technology change and cultural and societal change as it affects their industry and they can put their industry in a bubble, and there’s a lot of that thinking in veterinary medicine, are just making a huge mistake. So I don’t fear that because it ultimately won’t win, but there’s some of that thinking. But the biggest challenge will be if we don’t address the shortage.

Why? Because we’ve arrived to the point that people, poor, middle income, high income, it almost doesn’t matter. People cannot get in to see a veterinarian. Combination of retirement, COVID overhang, too few veterinarians being produced, resistance to telemedicine, resistance to mid-level professionals, that thinking about preventing change from seeping in have put people at risk with their pets. And people don’t know what to do about a medical condition of a young dog or cat unless they’re a trained veterinary professional. I’m a successful smart lawyer, I don’t have a clue how to take care of our three cats and dogs. So you have to get in to see vets, you have to access the care. And what will stop millennials from having a second dog or a third dog or a first cat or second cat will be what? Will be the husband, the wife or the partner saying to the other, “Hey, we can’t get Sparky in to see somebody right now, why would we go get another dog and have the same problem and know how painful that is?”

So to me, there’s one mission for veterinary medicine. Solve the shortage. Address the shortage. If you can’t solve it, address it, soften it, reduce it, increase access to care of any sort for anybody. Poor, middle income, high income, doesn’t matter. And we shouldn’t even be debating it. There literally should not be a debate about that. There should be a welcome mat out for new schools, for new programs for new professionals. And we can talk about. With you as the host, I won’t be afraid to get into what I think the reason is why there’s so much resistance. So the only dark cloud down the road, which is getting darker and bigger right now, that could slow down what would be otherwise just a glorious future for pets in this country will be if we don’t have professionals and access to care. And people are left going, “It’s just too painful. So we could talk about that if you want.

Well, I’ve been in this industry since 1997 and I first noticed that there was a shortage of veterinarians in 2008, right in the middle of the great recession. There might have been a distribution issue at that time of veterinarians because I didn’t see a shortage in places like California. If you were in a five doctor practice and you were the last person hired back in 2008, you might’ve lost your job. And in places like Texas, Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kansas, just all over the country, we’re in the middle of a great recession. Our phone’s ringing off the hook from veterinary practices needing to hire a veterinarian. Come out of the great recession after 2008, just the calls continue to increase. And then today our phone just rings all day long. The emails come in. Practices tell us they’ve been looking for months, some over a year, some 18 months.

We’ve had some that have been looking for close to two years. And then from a personal standpoint, friends of mine with pets, I have a friend who lives out in Seattle and they have a dog, they called nine practices. They couldn’t get in. They ended up having to drive a long ways from their home to be able to get their dog seen. I hear a lot of stories like that. So it’s good to hear that these new schools are going to be popping up. But I heard you say last week that’s really not going to make a huge dent in that situation.

So eight new schools will produce 800 to a thousand new vets a year. So that’s important, that’s meaningful. You have the boomers retiring. So you have the largest generation before millennials and they’re retiring. So you’ve got demand increasing, pet ownership expanding thankfully, but doctors retiring. So staying even is a challenge, Stacy. And catching up and getting ahead is even more of a challenge. But those schools that make a difference. What else will make a difference? I’ve been probably as involved or more involved than any one person in the industry on this issue, is just allowing telemedicine to be used, anchored in two things, that the veterinarian, she’s comfortable that she can help the pet owner through a virtual call like you and I are talking now, and that the pet owner knows they have a choice and if they don’t want to do it that way, they can choose not to.

But it makes such a difference. You’ve got a anxious pet owner 45 miles outside of Tulsa, maybe heading towards Fort Smith or something just out there, they can’t get in. What a difference it makes to reach a professional on the phone. And now with the technology, everybody can do a FaceTime, a Zoom, whatever it might be, but just take FaceTime as is the easiest, simplest, what a difference it makes to get a professional. And you can say, “Doctor, here’s Sparky, take a look. Can I tell you what has been happening the last two days? What can I do? What should I do?” And human medicine allows it in all 50 states. You can start a relationship that way. And the idea that somehow it won’t work for pets, honestly is silly. It’s in the category of silly to think that somehow parents of a two-year-old can have a conversation with a doctor about what their daughter or son are going through and that’s acceptable, and people that have a four-year-old Labradoodle can’t.

And we say, “You’ve got to see somebody in person. ” And if you can’t see somebody in person, the benefits of in-person or theoretical, that’s academic. You’ve got to have a solution. And that’s what happened in Oklahoma and in Kentucky, I don’t know if you knew that, but those two states had more to do with human healthcare taking on and embracing telemedicine than any other states in the United States. Why? Because you have vast areas of people living in rural settings or in small towns. They couldn’t see specialists, they didn’t have doctors and they weren’t going to drive two to three hours weekly or whenever they had to. The same thing in Eastern Kentucky. And somebody got their bright idea, well wait a second, Dr. Stacy’s right here and I’m 60 miles away, why can’t we do this?

And you can’t do everything, of course. You can’t do heart surgery by telemedicine, but there’s so many things you can do, and it’s made such a difference. So that’s that next piece. More schools, more graduates, graduate them sooner, good. Telemedicine, let the veterinarian determine for herself if she’s got the information needs to be helpful, great. Send them to the clinic if you need to, number two. Number three, human medicine for 60 years, as you know, you’ve heard me say this, for 60 years PAs or physician assistants, which are people that go to 27 months of what you call a shortened med school. But they’re good, they’re professionals and nurse practitioners. And that’s saved human medicine. There’s whole communities in Oklahoma that would have no healthcare if they didn’t have PAs and nurse practitioner. And you can’t tell everybody in Oklahoma, “Just go to Oklahoma City or Tulsa and you get all your medical care.”

Just call those practices and ask them how much room they have right now on their appointment calendars. And veterinary medicine has fought and is still fighting tooth and nail to stop developing mid-level professionals. And all the opposition on all these matters, there’s no shortage, we don’t need telemedicine, we don’t need veterinary PAs, we don’t need nurse practitioners. All of that is driven by one thing, protectionism. The fear that the economic interests of certain typically older generation veterinarians, their income is going to be harmed. The sad thing about that is it would expand, not be harmed.

Human medicine’s doing just fine. Doctors haven’t gone out of business and they wouldn’t survive if they couldn’t use PAs and nurse practitioners the way they do. You’ve heard me say this, my wife at Mayo, my medical care, I’m one of the fortunate folks that Mayo is my doctor. I get to go to Mayo Clinic if I have a problem. That’s a treat, right? It’s a privilege. You know who I see most of the time at Mayo? Really talented PAs. It wouldn’t even occur to me to say, “Hey, hey, hey, I’m at Mayo. You just tell this PA to get me a doctor.” I wouldn’t even think about doing that. Why? Because knowledgeable. They’re smart, they’re easy to talk to, they’re professional.

If I had cancer, would the surgery be done by a PA? Probably not. But all the consultations up to that could be. I had neck surgery this year, pretty serious surgery. I’ve got my follow-up, my six-month follow up this month with obviously an MRI, see how it looks. It’s with a PA. Wouldn’t even occur to me to say to Mayo, “I want a doctor.” And by the way, you know what Mayo would say? “We probably don’t have one. Okay? We’re stretched just like veterinary medicine is.” So there’s such low hanging fruit to grab and address the shortage. And we will. The good news is, Stacy, and I know you’re of the same of the same view, we will succeed. It will be slower and more expensive and painful than it needs to be, that’s for sure. But ultimately consumers get what they want. They do.

Well, you mentioned Oklahoma. I live in Oklahoma and I have benefited from telemedicine a number of times. A few years ago we have three sons and they were playing basketball and one of our boys hit another boy with the basketball in the eye and he had an eye injury and we were out of town at the time. So my parents took him to the eye doctor and he was seeing an ophthalmologist. And we had several follow-up appointments and the ophthalmologist used telemedicine to be able to look at the pupil of his eye to see if it was dilated or not. And it was tremendously beneficial that I’ve benefited from telemedicine personally a bunch of times. But I know my daughter, who lives in Oklahoma, she’s going to school in Texas, but in March she was trying to get into a couple of specialists here in Oklahoma and they were booked out till the end of this year, October, November. So it’s very hard as a human too to get into see specialists right now.

I’ll say what’s disappointing even more than frustrating is that the arguments used by industry to fight these changes that have been demonstrated to work in human healthcare at a scale that veterinary medicine can’t even imagine. What’s disappointing is the principle tool to address the issue as a policy issue is to try to scare people, just scare people into what’s going to happen. And they paint scenarios. And you know what? There’s no evidence that that’s the case. Ontario, Canada, 15 million people have had telemedicine for six years full on. There hasn’t been a single complaint ever filed with the Ontario board governing veterinary medicine. Not a single complaint of harm to a pet. So my view is don’t talk, don’t try to scare anybody in Ontario. Don’t try to paint scenarios about all these bad things that are going to happen when you’ve got six years of no complaints. It works. It doesn’t replace in care visits. It supplements. It steps up when they’re not necessary.

And by the way, the practices that use that understand it. Guess what? They’re not full of people that think they have a problem with the pet that requires a visit. How much less pressure is there in a practice that doesn’t have eight people with eight pets standing, trying to get in to see a doctor when it turns out that six of the eight did not need to see a doctor in person, that the problem they were experiencing could be addressed over telemedicine. That’s a common experience in both human and veterinary medicine. But we’re starting to win the battles legislatively, Stacy, as you know. So telemedicine will win it. It’s just is it going to take 30 years? Is it going to take 10 years, five years? It’ll take more than one. We know that. But we’re making progress. So I know we’re getting close to the witching hour for this program. You and I could talk for two or three hours, so if you ever want me back and can put up with my viewpoints, feel free to reach out. But I’ve enjoyed the conversation. I appreciate the interest.

Well, I’ll have a couple more questions for before we go. So what message or principle do you wish you could teach everyone listening here?

I think more than anything is lower the temperature. Don’t be afraid of change. Study the evidence and don’t resist pilots and experiments to see if different methods can solve these problems. More than anything, if people would just … There’s so much rhetoric and it’s highly charged. And it gets personal and it doesn’t need to be. I’m a lawyer and we’re trained not to take things personally, and I don’t. I think that advice in general in your life leads to better outcomes. Just don’t take things personally, whatever it might be. That’s one thing.

Not taking things personally, that is good advice.

I believe so much and programs and projects and proposals and innovations I’ve been associated with almost all have come from taking a look at human healthcare, which has so much money and has the freedom and ability and track record to experiment. And I look at that and go, “How do they do that?” And then when I see something working there, I just ask the question, “Is there any reason it couldn’t work here with pets?” And almost every time the answer is there’s no reason. We ought to try it and not be afraid.

So get outside your box, just out of your comfort zone, and take a look, whether it’s another country or another state or another industry. And the other industries that are so much in the news do that all the time. They’re borrowing ideas from each other all the time, that’s part of life. And veterinary medicine for so long, Stacy, was a sideshow. It was down a small road and there was a cinder block clinic and people just didn’t pay much attention to it and there wasn’t as much of it. And now that’s changed. You’ve got millennials and Gen Zs and they ask a lot, and they’re not going to stop asking. So great opportunity, but don’t close the door before you’ve looked outside. See what’s out there. You might be surprised.

Such good advice. Well, you’ve got the mic, Mark. What is one last thing that you want to share with our listeners of the People of Animal Health Podcast before you drop the mic today?

Well, to all my friends in the East and the Midwest and the South, pay a little attention to the PAC 12. The sports are better out west than you may think, but I’m married to a LSU and Tennessee grad, so I don’t get very far in my own house with that. But enjoy yourself. Everybody’s hotter than they’ve ever been, wherever they live in America these days. And my theory is this, if I can get my walk in where the outdoor temperature is not greater than my body temperature of 98.6, I’m probably okay. Now I’m a lawyer giving myself medical advice, but I do find a daily walk in the morning in the desert, and I try to do it every day, isn’t a bad way to start the day. And hopefully it keeps me healthy long enough to keep causing trouble for the pet industry. But I appreciate it, Stacy, and we’ll see you soon at many conferences and thanks and good luck with your podcast. This is a great new program.

Thank you, Mark. Thanks for being with us here today. I enjoyed visiting with you.

All right, see you, Stacy.