Episode #91 – Dr. Steven Hansen

Stacy Pursell:
Do you work in the animal health industry or veterinary profession? Have you ever wondered how successful people got their start and what led them to where they are today? Hi everyone. I’m Stacy Pursell, founder and CEO of The Vet Recruiter, the leading executive search and recruiting firm specializing in the animal health industry and veterinary profession. I was the first recruiter in the United States to focus exclusively on this space, building the first search firm dedicated to this unique niche.
Over the past 28 plus years, I’ve developed relationships with many of the industry’s top leaders and trailblazers. The People of Animal Health Podcast features the incredible individuals I’ve had the privilege to connect with throughout my career. In each episode, you’ll hear their stories, their career journeys, leadership lessons, and the impact they’ve made on the industry. With a wide range of expert guests, you’ll gain insights, inspiration, and ideas you can apply to your own career. Thanks for tuning in and enjoy the episode.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to The People of Animal Health Podcast. On this episode of The People of Animal Health Podcast, we welcome Dr. Steven Hansen, a veterinarian board certified specialist in both animal welfare and toxicology and president and CEO of the Arizona Humane Society. With more than 30 years in animal welfare, Dr. Hansen previously served as chief operating officer of the ASPCA, helping shape national animal protection efforts. Since joining AHS in 2013, he has led major initiatives, including the expansion of the Lazin Animal Foundation Trauma Hospital and innovative neonatal care programs.
Today, we’ll explore his career leadership philosophy and how veterinary medicine continues to advance lifesaving work for vulnerable animals. Well, Steve, welcome to The People of Animal Health Podcast. I’m so excited to have you here today.

Dr. Steven Hansen:
Thank you, Stacy. I’m thrilled to be here.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, Steve, I’ve known you for a long time, but I would love to start off at the beginning of your life. What was life like growing up for you and where did you grow up?

Dr. Steven Hansen:
So I grew up in a town in Iowa called Muscatine, Iowa. It’s on the Mississippi River on the east side of about 30,000 people. So a smaller community, very agricultural around us. My dad was an engineer, we grew up with pets. We always had animals in the house, no surprise. Always had dogs and lots of critters and just about anything you can imagine. So it was a great place to grow up. We spent our time on our bicycles riding all over everywhere. It was a little different than it is now, but it was a good background.

Stacy Pursell:
At what point and why did you decide to become a veterinarian?

Dr. Steven Hansen:
So, I probably decided to become a veterinarian in high school. I had a high school biology instructor who was very inspiring and we actually did some pretty in depth animal dissection at that time in high school, which was pretty impressive. And at that point, I decided I wanted to be a veterinarian and from then on it didn’t change. I was set on that path and I never strayed from it.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, let’s talk about your early career. How did you first get started in the veterinary profession?

Dr. Steven Hansen:
Yeah, so I went to Iowa State University and my other home besides Iowa was always Texas. So in one of my trips to Houston, I knocked on some doors during my third year of veterinary school and I knocked on a door of Missouri City Animal Clinic, which is a southeast suburb of Houston. And Dr. Bill Smiley was the veterinarian who owned that practice. I asked him if he would be interested in taking a preceptor. So that’s where I went for a preceptorship and I loved it. It was a fabulous clinic and he offered me a job. So that was my first job was in Houston, Texas. He was a great mentor. That was a really good decision for me because it was my first big city and I’ve lived in a lot of big cities and he was a great mentor. It was a special practice because we were on the edge of a very high income area, but we also had clientele from a very low income area.
So I did get to see some of the challenges that families were encountering. We had canine distemper and canine parvo and heartworm disease everywhere, very common problems in Texas, lots of fleas and ticks and all kinds of interesting things to be exposed to. So it was a great opportunity for a practice. We were supported by an emergency clinic where I also worked to make some extra money, so I was exposed to emergency medicine very early on. So that was a really good decision for my career for a first practice.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, Steve, you have spent now more than three decades in animal welfare and veterinary medicine. What originally inspired you to pursue this path at animal welfare and what drew you specifically to shelter medicine leadership?

Dr. Steven Hansen:
So my path to nonprofit animal welfare and shelter medicine is an unusual path because it involved starting in practice in Houston and then I went to practice in Chicago and I actually ended up in Chicago because I had interviewed for a residency at the University of Illinois in veterinary toxicology, which was something that I was very interested in clinical toxicology. And I never heard back from the professor that I interviewed with.
So I went to Chicago and worked with one of my classmates for a year and I got a phone call from the university and I said, “We’ve been having trouble finding you. We’ve got funding now.” So I actually ended up in the university and doing a residency in veterinary clinical toxicology at the University of Illinois and did a master’s degree at the same time. And that was a great experience because it was clinical toxicology and it was all about being a detective.
Oftentimes what you see is not what you get and it’s not always a toxicology case. Many times it was actually not a toxicology case. So that was my time spent in academia and I actually was one of the directors of the Animal Poison Control Center at that time under Dr. Bill Buck.

Stacy Pursell:
That’s when I met you.

Dr. Steven Hansen:
Yep, that’s right. Yeah. And he was my chief professor there and he was a great mentor. So that experience was a fantastic experience. I was always interested in clinical toxicology, but I had student loans and needed to go out into practice for a few years before going back to academia. And the path from there is interesting because I’m definitely a veterinarian that’s experienced a lot and I do encourage young veterinarians to always keep their options open. So I then went to the pharmaceutical industry.
I was hired by one of the companies that we were consulting with Sandoz Animal Health out of Dallas, Texas at the time. I was hired to actually be their technical services veterinarian because I had so much experience in managing adverse reactions and placing clinical studies and doing clinical research. And the interesting thing that happened as everybody knows that works in industry is we got merged and relocated to Chicago and that was a great experience for me because people in Texas were horrified at the thought of moving to Chicago and I had already practiced in Chicago and knew it well.
So it seemed like most of the company actually bailed and that made for huge opportunity. So I went to Chicago and became the director of veterinary support and clinical research for Sandoz Animal Health. I was there for several years and that was a tremendous growing experience as well as understanding industry and how industry works. I was involved with mostly with EPA but some FDA work. We had some products that were in line at FDA, but I became knowledgeable on clinical trials and some basic research as well. And so then that’s from there is where I actually ended up in the nonprofit world. Sandoz then was merged with Ciba-Geigy and I had an option to stay or an option not to stay. And I got another phone call and this was one to come back and run the National Animal Poison Control Center, which was being acquired by the ASPCA out of New York City.
It was a really good plan between the ASPC and the University of Illinois. The program was an expensive program and it needed to grow and it couldn’t grow just inside the university. So we became a department of the College of Veterinary Medicine, but actually being a subsidiary of the ASPCA. And that’s where my state that Animal Poison Control Center long-term started in my involvement in animal welfare specifically.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, since becoming president and CEO of the Arizona Humane Society in 2013, you have led major expansions in medical care and shelter services. What was your long-term vision when you first stepped into this role?

Dr. Steven Hansen:
Yeah, so I was interviewed in the summer of 2013. I got a call from a recruiter and at the ASPCA, we were very aware of the challenges that were happening in Arizona and in California, large numbers of animals coming into shelters and small percentages actually getting adopted out. So I had a keen interest and the Arizona Humane Society had a program called the Emergency Animal Medical Technician Program in which they sent out emergency ambulances to pick up sick and injured animals and to do cruelty investigation.
So I had a strong interest in what was actually happening because it was very heavily focused on veterinary medicine. I went and interviewed and the board had a great desire for the organization to grow and they weren’t sure quite how to do it. And the resources that we had were not really what needed to be done. So we knew we had to build a new hospital.
So we step out on a journey and the journey took about 10 years because we had to build support. We had to build a case for the trauma hospital and we launched it in 2024 and it was a $52 million project on five acres close to the Phoenix Zoo. And it’s a really unusual hospital system that we designed and built. Our board was heavily involved. We have a great staff, so we were all involved. It was not just me by any means.
It was a major team effort, but we are now one of the largest shelter systems in the country. We take in 28,000 animals a year, almost all of them are sick and injured and we have 28 veterinarians, Stacy, on our staff. So for a shelter, that’s a pretty large veterinary team. We have 500 employees. So the reason our trauma hospital is so different is because we do focus on sick and injured animals and we will take them from anywhere.
We focus on Maricopa County, but they do come from elsewhere, they come from other states, they come from all over if we have capacity. So we run it and it’s designed very much like a human hospital, lots and lots of, well, maybe even more transparent, but lots of windows. We wanted to make sure nothing happens behind closed doors. And in animal welfare, funding is everything and being able to tell your story is key. So we have windows into our surgical suites. You can come and view just as a visitor, you can go on a behind the scenes tour and intimately see what’s going on. So we have a steady flow of emergency vehicles coming in all day long. They deploy from one campus. We have three total campuses. They deploy from one campus. They start many miles away and work their way in unless they have an emergency, then they come directly in.
Our ICU runs 24/7. We’re a teaching hospital, so we’re actually the only required teaching rotation for the University of Arizona’s College of Veterinary Medicine. And we have got eight veterinary students here last in their final year of learning are here every day and we also have Midwestern veterinary students. So yeah, we had a vision of taking a rather small veterinary program to a pretty major program. We’ve got quite a team that runs this.

Stacy Pursell:
It’s impressive, Steve. And in 2024, the former Second Chance Trauma Hospital was reintroduced as a Lazin Animal Foundation trauma hospital as part of your new campus expansion. How has expanding those services changed the level of care you can provide to vulnerable animals?

Dr. Steven Hansen:
Yeah, so Stacy, it’s dramatically changed what we can do. We’ve got a boarded surgeon that comes in every week. We do a lot of orthopedic work. We handle gunshot wounds. We handle hit by cars. We have a contract with almost every jurisdiction in the valley and we’ve got almost six million people in the Greater Phoenix area these days. So that means there are a lot of cruelty investigations that we do get involved with and we can manage those critical patients.
The ICU runs 24/7. So when we have a critical animal that comes in, we can manage that patient all night long. So an animal in our system of care never is euthanized for anything related to length of time or space or anything that’s remotely treatable. It does mean that we have to work very hard to move animals to the system. So today we have about 800 animals under roof and another 900 in foster and we’ll have close to a thousand in foster and probably 900 under a roof before we hit our peak in June.
So we have an enormous amount of animals coming and going and they’re going out to foster because they need to come back for bandage changes or suture removals or whatever they might need. And that foster system is critical in making sure that the hospital can run. So yeah, it’s a full-fledged, it looks very much like a specialty hospital, very well-equipped and very well staffed. We’ve got one board certified shelter medicine veterinarian on staff. We’ve got another one that’s in the process of getting her boards. We’ve got a resident in shelter medicine. We’ve got an intern. We’ll have two residents starting this summer and a new intern. So our teaching component is a very big part of what we do, and it’s very important to us. We love the fact that we’ve got young people constantly coming into our facility. We learn from them, they learn from us and we try and hire some of them.

Stacy Pursell:
Programs like the Bottle Baby Kitten ICU and maternity suites reflect a proactive approach to neonatal and maternal care. Why are these programs so critical to increasing lifesaving outcomes in shelter medicine today?

Dr. Steven Hansen:
Yes, Stacy, these programs are super important. We started our nursery, our bottle nursery several years ago now. We actually modeled it after our good friends at the San Diego Humane Society. They shared all of their protocols and everything that they do and trained our staff. One beautiful thing about shelter medicine is we all share and share alike. So we learn from others and they learn from us, but that nursery runs 24/7.
We’ll feed 3,000 kittens this year. It’s a huge initiative for us and we combine it with an effort to really push spay and neuter. But these kittens are coming in. They’re 80 to a hundred grams and we bottle-feed them. We’re very, very good at it and it is not easy to do. They don’t let me bottle-feed kittens. I’m way too slow. It takes a special touch. We’ve got a mixture of volunteers and staff members that do it and then fosters take them.
So it’s a revolving door. They come in our door, we feed them, we stabilize them, and then we move them into a foster home as soon as we can so we can move more animals in. And we’re bottle feeding kittens and puppies. Right now it’s heavily kittens and we adopt out thousands of kittens every year. It’s really pretty exciting. We’ve become well known for having an amazing selection of beautiful cats. So it is a key part of what we do. Our other emergency isolation areas include our parvovirus ward, which we started several years ago.
We were one of the early shelter systems that managed parvovirus. We’re very, very good at managing that. We can do that in our sleep. We take animals that have parvovirus from just about anywhere. If they bring them to us, we’ll treat them. We also treat canine distemper. I don’t like to advertise that one because that one still scares me, but we do not automatically euthanize a canine distemper positive dog.
We save about 50% of them. Once it goes neurologic, then there’s nothing more that can be done and we adopt them out, but we adopt them out with full knowledge that there may be issues down the road or there may not be. So we’re very good at managing canine distemper, I hate to say, but we’ve learned from our partners mostly at the University of Wisconsin. They have been key in helping us with our protocols to manage canine distemper.
We’re also very knowledgeable on valley fever, which is a disease that I knew nothing about when I left veterinary school, but it is a fungal disease that’s very concentrated in the Sonoran Desert Southwest. It’s not unlike blastomycosis, which we dealt with in Chicago. And there will be a vaccine hopefully someday soon, which is very exciting. So yeah, our specialty wards, we’ve got isolation wards. We can manage just about anything crazy that comes in the door.
We do manage also ringworm, which is not deadly, but an incredibly big challenge for shelters because households that have large numbers of cats that aren’t being properly cared for often end up with ringworm and those are a challenge.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, Steve, before joining the Arizona Humane Society, you spent 16 years as COO of the ASPCA. How did that national leadership experience shape your approach to innovation and organizational growth?

Dr. Steven Hansen:
So yeah, Stacy, my experience in New York City at the ASPCA really was a fabulous experience. I learned a lot as a part of that organization. And if anything, I learned that we as an organization need to think big and we can make a difference. We can develop plans, we can raise funds, we can do a lot more than we might’ve thought we can do. So that experience was really good. I was exposed to shelter medicine all across the country and outside of the country and that really opens up your scope of what is possible and what’s happening out there.
In Arizona, then we started visiting some of those shelters and my team and I have been in countless shelters across the country in Canada and Mexico. And we did all of that as a very purposeful push before we started designing our campus here at Papago Park, which was designed by Animal Arts. They were a tremendous partner of ours and I can’t say enough good about the team at Animal Arts.
So yeah, that experience, if anything, it just opened my mind to what’s possible and how to collaborate across state lines and learn from others. It was very helpful. I think the team here didn’t know what was possible and once we got out of their way and turned them loose, this team just does a fabulous job.

Stacy Pursell:
Steve, you are board certified in both animal welfare and toxicology, which is a unique combination. How has that dual expertise influenced your work in veterinary medicine, shelter care, and public advocacy?

Dr. Steven Hansen:
Yeah, so Stacy, that is a really unusual combination for sure. And the veterinary toxicology boards and just being a veterinary toxicologist taught me a lot about research because I was involved in research. It taught me a lot about forensic medicine and not always, I guess, taking what is seen as fact. You have to dig into it. It’s amazing how many times a toxicology case is not a toxicology case, Stacy. So that clinical medicine is important. So that’s really what I learned in veterinary toxicology and my years at the Poison Control Center.
The other thing I learned was data. We managed an enormous amount of data and the Poison Control Center still does. They’ve continued to grow. They do an amazing job, an amazing service across the country and across the world, but collecting and managing data was something that we did. We are very data rich here.
We have got very sophisticated data dashboards and it helps us manage a large number of animals. So that was incredibly helpful. Of course, the American College of Animal Welfare, which I’m also the treasurer of, I was on the founding committee of that board back, I don’t know, 15 years ago now, I suppose. And that just again, opens up the avenue to animal welfare beyond dogs and cats and critters. We were focused on all species and again, it opens up your eyes to what’s happening and what’s possible. So yeah, interesting combination, but it has served me well.

Stacy Pursell:
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Well, animal welfare organizations are facing growing demands and increasingly complex challenges. What are some of the biggest pressures currently affecting shelters and veterinary teams across the country?

Dr. Steven Hansen:
Yeah, Stacy. So animal welfare shelter systems are facing an enormous amount of pressure right now, and I’m very involved on a national level. We have a CEO group that meets annually and will be meeting in Washington, DC here in a couple of weeks. Our biggest challenges, there are several of them, but I would say that the biggest challenge really is the flow of animals coming in and the reason that the animals are coming to our shelters. And the reason that they’re coming, our call center takes about 10,000 calls a month. The reason that they’re coming to our shelters are mostly twofold. And the biggest issue is the cost of veterinary care. And the second issue is housing here in Maricopa County and housing everywhere.
The cost of veterinary care is a huge challenge for our profession and it is something that is impacting clinics now with clinics are seeing less appointments interestingly and revenues are going up slowly. Our answer to this situation is we have two full service hospitals. We just reopened a second one that we remodeled. It’s a state-of-the-art hospital. It was funded in a large part by PetSmart Charities and it serves a low income area, the Sunnyslope area of Phoenix, which is where our original shelter is located. And it provides spay and neuter, but it provides the full gamut of services. It’s a full service hospital.
We have a second full service hospital at our campus at South Mountain, which is a campus on 20 acres built in 2002 and it does the same thing. But the third and fourth things that we did was thirdly, we opened an urgent care hospital here at our Papago Park campus that runs from 6:00 PM until 2:00 providing outpatient care for families that need it for their pets. We just started that in December and it’s doing very well supporting the community.
We’ve got our full service partners and our emergency clinics that send people to us and we forward people to them that need overnight care. It’s a really good relationship. The fourth thing that we did was we launched telemedicine and telemedicine is a hot topic in veterinary medicine. We were one of the first states and one of the few states that can establish a veterinary client-patient relationship telephonically. And our organization was the key organization in getting that legislation passed in Arizona. I know there are a lot of people that are not in favor of this approach, but I can tell you my experience in the Poison Control Center was key. Poison Control Center is all about telemedicine and it works very, very well if you know what you’re doing. So we’ve been running telemedicine for about a year and a half now and it works really well.
There are parameters that you have to work around. We refer people to our clinics to other clinics. We actually have a team that will actually go out to follow up onsite in homes for some of our cruelty cases. So it does actually work very well and I would love to be able to spread that word loud and clear. We have for profit practices here in Arizona that are starting their own telemedicine to support their practices and it’s not something to be afraid of. It is something to do well and to follow the rules and we are very cautious to make sure that we are managing it well. And when it’s not a telemedicine case, we do not handle it as a telemedicine case, but we’ve got a large rural state. We might have five to six million people here in the Greater Valley area, but rural Arizona has got a very serious lack of access to veterinary care and telemedicine is an important part of it.
So I do hope that other states decide to give it a try. I hope they pay attention to what’s happening in Arizona because I do think that it is the future, even though the pushback may occur for several years. I think it needs to be there just like it is on the human side. It’s just part of veterinary medicine and it works really well.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, I’ve used telemedicine for myself and for my children and it’s a nice convenience to have.

Dr. Steven Hansen:
And it’s no different with pets. The argument that the pets can’t speak, it doesn’t work. You can see a lot on video, you can ask a lot of questions and you can send them right onto an emergency clinic if they need to go. You can send them to a full service clinic and you’re basically triaging, taking care of what is appropriate and forwarding on what’s not appropriate and it works well. The other… Oh, go ahead, Stacy.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, I was going to say it’s good to hear a successful example of telemedicine.

Dr. Steven Hansen:
Yeah. And the Poison Control Center is key. And I testified several times and I drew from that experience. Poison Control Center is 100% telemedicine and it works very, very well. And most veterinarians have used one of multiple poison control centers to actually help with their case management. But of course, other challenges in shelters for us are big dogs and cats. So we are very actively marketing big dogs and we’ve had some great help from Hills. They’ve been sponsoring our big dog campaign for the last six months. And what we do is, as I mentioned, we are data rich. We know who’s coming into our shelters. We know where they’re from. We know their demographics and we use a lot of electronic communications, advertising and marketing to market these dogs. When I was coming in this morning, there was a big dog going out on a day adventure.
So we’ve got people that come in and they take dogs out of the shelter, they’ll take them out to the forest preserves or the mountains and walk them. They wear vests, they get them adopted. We know that the demographics that are going to adopt a 75-pound dog and we’ll direct our marketing towards them trying to get homes for those dogs. And then what we’re doing is we’re pressing very hard on spay and neuter. We will be launching a very big spay and neuter campaign directed at big dogs and cats. Those are the two flows that come into shelters that are most at risk.
We have lots of Chihuahuas here in Arizona, but they’re not at risk. We can send them to other areas of the country if we can’t place them, but they get placed quickly. Our average length of stay is short. A dog stays with us generally less than 14 days.
That doesn’t include foster time, that’s hospital time and that’s adoption time. But the big dogs drag that up a bit. They take longer and the puppies, of course, they can be out in hours.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, I love that you have those volunteers that take those dogs out on walks and adventures.

Dr. Steven Hansen:
Yeah, it works really well. They enjoy doing it. And we work with ASU here, Arizona State Universities, got a very strong behavior department. Dr. Clive Wynn runs that department and they’ve done research out of our shelter and other shelters and they’ve monitored cortisol levels and other stress indicators in these dogs. And what they’ve shown is that you can take a dog out for a day trip all day long, have them out, walking the trails, getting treats, having fun and come back and they will stay with a reduced cortisol level in the shelter for a few days so they’ll be more relaxed. They’ve gotten some exercise. The odds of them getting adopted once they’ve been on one of these staycation sort of things is much higher. So it works well.

Stacy Pursell:
I love that. Well, Steve, you remain active in animal welfare policy and legislation in Arizona frequently testifying on animal-related issues. How important is advocacy work in creating meaningful long-term change for animal welfare?

Dr. Steven Hansen:
So Stacy, advocacy has been really important for us and it is something that I learned from my experience at the ASPCA. We’ve got to also change laws to help animals. So we have been very involved. We have a person who is focused on legislation. We do have a lobbyist. We were heavily involved in, for example, a law that protects animals locked in cars in the heat of the summer and it was a dual bill for kids and dogs. And it’s a very well-written bill. I won’t go into the details, but that works well. We’re key in legislation that does provide tuition reimbursement for veterinarians. So any veterinarians that want to come to Arizona, you can get $25,000 a year for four years. You have to work two years in a nonprofit or in a rural area and then two years anywhere. So that was huge.
Our telemedicine bill was huge. And right now we’re working on another controversial bill. We love to have controversial bills. It’s an alternate track for veterinary technicians. One of our biggest challenges is having enough veterinary technicians and we very much value a certified veterinary technician. We are a teaching hospital, so we are unusual. We have a very robust teaching program for veterinary technicians. We actually have an entire learning management system and a team that’s focused on developing our materials to train technicians.
And what this bill would allow is for somebody like us to actually qualify somebody to take the national exam and become a certified veterinary technician. They do still have to be exposed to all the large animal pieces. They have to learn the why. They will learn everything that you learn in a school setting, but they will learn it while they’re working on the job.
It allows somebody that can afford tuition to actually be able to pursue their veterinary technician desires. And what our hope is that we can keep more veterinary technicians in the field. This is not going to disrupt any of the teaching programs, any of the colleges. It’s a relatively low volume approach to getting more technicians, but it’s just another opportunity. So that’s something that’s in the legislature now and we’re pretty excited about it. Our relationship with the University of Arizona and our teaching hospital makes us a very unusual candidate to be able to provide that training.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, Steve, in addition to leading the Arizona Humane Society, you serve as treasurer of the American College of Animal Welfare and chair of the Association of Animal Welfare Certification Council. How do these leadership roles help advance standards and education within the profession?

Dr. Steven Hansen:
So the American College of Animal Welfare is one of our newer colleges, though it’s about 15 years old now. And it’s one that’s very important. And to me, it covers all animal welfare. We do have shelter medicine experts here, but this board is wider, covers all species. So it’s an organization that’s growing and we’d love to attract more veterinarians. Veterinarians can go through residencies in some of the schools or they can do an alternate track, not unlike our veterinary technician track that we’re working on.
So yeah, I think that that’s an important college, especially when it comes to bigger picture concepts and policy regarding all animals. The certification for animal welfare advancement is very specific to animal welfare and I am a CAWA. It’s called a certified animal welfare administrator and I chair that committee. It’s one of our strategies to grow staff here is we basically threw down the gauntlet a couple of years ago and said that we challenge you all.
We want to be the organization that has the most certified animal welfare administrators and we have about 10. And what happens, Stacy, you’ll appreciate this as other people hire our certified animal welfare administrators and we lose them and that’s fine. We’ve got a steady stream of more coming. So I believe in that as a teaching mechanism. So for our staff here, we give you the time to take the exam, we pay for the exam, we give you a bonus if you pass the exam and we celebrate the fact that you pass the exam. It’s the best way to have somebody learn all the ins and outs of shelter medicine and managing a shelter, managing every piece of it, managing fundraising, something that veterinarians generally know nothing about. So yeah, those are two organizations that are very near and dear to my heart.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, Steve, looking ahead, how do you see the future of animal welfare evolving as veterinary medicine, public expectations and community-based services continue to evolve?

Dr. Steven Hansen:
Yeah, I think veterinary medicine will continue to be just an important part of the fabric of all of our homes. I think access to veterinary care is going to be the growing and growing conversation piece. We have a rotation that will start next fall for our veterinary students at the University of Arizona to actually work in one of our three clinics where they’ll actually have a focus on the spectrum of care, on how to provide care when what you’d love to do is an MRI or a CT, but you can’t because they can’t afford it, how to provide care to help keep these animals in homes, how to do it in a cost-effective stepwise manner.
I think that’s going to continue to become more and more important. I almost look at it as partially the way we used to manage veterinary medicine. We spend a lot of time using our hands and our eyes and our ears and asking a lot of questions and then building a diagnostic plan that was stepwise instead of getting a quote for $10,000 that most families can’t afford, but trying to work through.
So I think that’s a really important piece of veterinary medicine in the future. We’ve got to keep pets in homes and I think this is the way to do it. It will keep practices busy because I think every home needs a pet and everybody needs a cat, especially if you travel a lot. So we actually adopt out slightly more cats than dogs, which is really pretty cool. I think the future of veterinary medicine is very bright. I think we do need to grow our veterinary technicians. I think we need to keep them in the profession and we need to keep our young veterinarians stimulated. We have pretty good success finding veterinarians that want to get into a more community-based practice that works pretty well for us, though we’re always looking for veterinarians. And I know you’ve helped me place veterinarians before Stacy, and I really value the work that you do and your team does. You guys are incredibly skilled.

Stacy Pursell:
Thank you, Steve. It’s always a pleasure to work with you and we have worked together at various organizations throughout your career. So I’m curious, Steve, what has been the most surprising thing to you during your career in the veterinary profession?

Dr. Steven Hansen:
So the most surprising thing to me probably is when I look back and see the kind of odd path that I took. And I guess it’s a takeaway for me is don’t close any doors. Always keep looking and keep your options open. Opportunity will come knocking, but prepare yourself for opportunity. Don’t sit idle, do things. I got an MBA. That was one of the most fun pieces of my career was getting an MBA from the University of Illinois because as veterinarians, we’re not taught much business and that was one of the most enjoyable experiences that I can reflect on. So find ways to continue to grow and you’ll be very, very successful.

Stacy Pursell:
You had one of the most interesting paths in veterinary medicine. What does your crystal ball say about the future of the veterinary profession?

Dr. Steven Hansen:
Yeah, I think veterinary medicine is very, very bright. I think that I’ve sat on the interview teams many times for the University of Illinois, and I’m always amazed at the bright young people that are entering the profession. And I think that speaks highly of where we’re headed. I think that the profession is bright. We’ve got amazing pharmaceutical companies developing drugs for us, but all kinds of things at our fingertips, amazing equipment.
We just have to be cautious on how we build our diagnostic plans to make sure that we’re not turning people away that we actually could find ways to help them keep their pets in their homes. But veterinary medicine is bright. I think it’s the best profession out there and I’ve enjoyed this unusual path for sure.

Stacy Pursell:
I couldn’t agree more. I do believe it’s the best profession out there. Steve, what advice would you give the younger version of yourself?

Dr. Steven Hansen:
The younger version of myself, I would say is yes, keep your eyes open, work very hard. That’s a message that I’ve tried to communicate a lot is don’t be afraid to put hours in and work. And I think that’s important, especially early in your career. Work-life balance is important, but if you actually love the profession, I do encourage you to put your time in. And for me, it took a little time to probably learn some of that. I know like many veterinarians, I thought I knew a lot when I got out of school and pretty quickly realized I didn’t know anything. So yeah, I think working hard early and not being afraid to put the time in is probably something I would encourage everybody.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, the more you work early in your career, the more you learn faster.

Dr. Steven Hansen:
You do and the more you learn that you don’t know anything. And I think that’s an important lesson for young veterinarians to learn is you need to rely on what you’ve learned, but you need to know how to find answers. You need to know who to ask, you need to know who to collaborate with. You don’t ever want to think you know it or you’re going to find yourself in trouble.

Stacy Pursell:
So true. Well, Steve, what message or principle do you wish you could teach everyone listening to our podcast today?

Dr. Steven Hansen:
I think that it really is that this is an amazing profession that you’re involved with one way, shape or another, whether you’re a veterinarian or a veterinary technician or another professional. It is the best profession out there. Do have an open mind to what veterinary medicine can do. Don’t be afraid of some of the ideas coming down. Think about them, investigate them, and find ways to help your clients. And I think that you’ll find that your career will be incredibly rewarding and you’ll enjoy every minute of it.

Stacy Pursell:
Such good advice. And I know how much you have enjoyed your career and gotten so much out of it as the profession has gotten so much out of you and all your contributions. So thank you for all the great work that you’re doing for our profession, especially in the area of animal welfare, Steve. Well, some of our guests say they’ve had a key book they read that helped them along the way. Do you have a key book in your life that’s impacted you the most?

Dr. Steven Hansen:
So I do, and it’s probably not one that anybody would ever choose, but it’s Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers.

Stacy Pursell:
Yes.

Dr. Steven Hansen:
And that book, the reason you can’t tell it, but I’m smiling big because there’s a bit of a story behind that book. It was quite an eye-opener for me because the message is nothing comes easy. And if you think somebody has become an expert or is the best basketball player in the world because they woke up one day, it’s not the way it works. You might have talent, but it takes a lot of time and energy. It takes 10,000 hours.

Stacy Pursell:
I was going to say, he said 10,000 hours. That’s right.

Dr. Steven Hansen:
Takes 10,000 hours. And so our listeners might love this one. So I paid both of my children to read that book when they were early in their high school careers and they hated the idea that they had to read this book, but they read it and they got paid and I think it was worth it.

Stacy Pursell:
I love that. Well, you’ve got the mic. What is one thing you want to share with our listeners of The People of Animal Health Podcast before you drop the mic today?

Dr. Steven Hansen:
So I would just say if you’re not working with shelters, please consider working with shelters. Our shelter community provides a lot of the animals that end up in veterinary hospitals. For us, we have a relationship with DCA, which we very much appreciate, but be open to shelter animals coming in and don’t assume that because they come from a shelter, they’re sick or they’re somehow lesser. Most of the time they are amazing pets and they need homes. So always give a shelter the benefit of the doubt. If you can help a shelter, please help a shelter, build a relationship, se their clients. Most of those clients will then become your clients.

Stacy Pursell:
We’ve been doing quite a bit of recruiting work for shelters and it’s such rewarding work. The people that we’re placing, just they find the work very rewarding and they’re making an impact and a difference. And Steve, you’ve really made a tremendous impact on our profession. Again, thank you for all the work you’re doing in animal welfare and thank you for being on The People of Animal Health Podcast today, Steve.

Dr. Steven Hansen:
Thank you, Stacy. I’ve enjoyed it.