Episode #93 – Dr. Mark Stetter

From Disney to Dean
Join us for a conversation with Dr. Mark Stetter, dean of UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, as he shares lessons from leading world-class Veterinary institutions and Disney’s Animal Kingdom. We explore One Health, wildlife conservation, innovation in Veterinary medicine, and leadership strategies for addressing global health and sustainability challenges.

Transcript

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. Today’s guest is Dr. Mark Stetter, Dean of the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, the nation’s top ranked veterinary program for more than a decade. A board certified specialist in zoo and wildlife medicine, Dr. Stetter has built a career at the intersection of animal, human, and environmental health. Before UC Davis, he served as dean at the Colorado State University College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and spent 15 years with the Walt Disney Company, leading global animal programs. Dr. Stetter is passionate about connecting people, advancing science, and inspiring solutions that improve life on a global scale. Welcome to the People of Animal Health Podcast, Mark, and how are you today?

Dr. Mark Stetter:
Great. It’s a Friday, it’s a beautiful spring weekend here in California. Things are great. How are you, Stacy? Thanks for inviting me.

Stacy Pursell:
I’m doing well too. Thank you, Mark. I’m so excited for you to be here today. I would love to start off at the beginning. What was your life like growing up and where did you grow up?

Dr. Mark Stetter:
Sure. So I’m a Chicago suburbs kid and I’m the kid in the neighborhood that had all the weird pets. We certainly had our dogs and cats, but I also had guinea pigs and ducks and raccoons and all of those things. So it was easy early on to have an affinity for animals and some of the unique pets and really enjoyed that part of my childhood. When I was in middle school and high school, the local veterinary clinic just a couple blocks from my house was in between school and my home. And so, it was an easy way for me to connect with veterinary medicine, as I would stop by pretty much every day, hang out at the veterinary clinic and be able to learn about veterinary medicine at a very early age. And they were very welcoming and it became a core of what I wanted to do and what I wanted to be when I grew up.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, tell me about the early days in your veterinary career. How did you first get started?

Dr. Mark Stetter:
Sure. I was one of those folks that was heavily influenced by things like All Creatures Great and Small, the book and also the TV show at the time, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. And so, I had always been very interested in how to combine veterinary medicine and marine biology in the aquatic world. So my early days both in pre-vet and in veterinary school were exploring both ideas at the same time. I worked at marine lands and sea worlds and did a course called AQUAVETs and worked during my summers at zoos. And so, it reinforced what I thought I wanted to do before veterinary school, which is to work with conservation and work with zoo and wildlife animals and aquatic critters.
So as soon as I got out of veterinary school, a lot of my mentors in the zoo world said, “It’s really important if you’re going to be a strong clinician to be able to learn from domestic animals.” And I was really ready to go right into zoo and wildlife, but I was coached and strongly mentored to do more in the clinical space with domestic animals so I could apply if I’m going to work with a lion or a cheetah that has renal disease or heart disease. Boy, you really need to know how to do that with a domestic cat before suddenly you’re doing it with a more difficult case.
So I did an internship at the Animal Medical Center up in New York City, really enjoyed that year, got to meet my future wife who is also doing a tech internship there. Have many long-term friends from my time at the Animal Medical Center. But after I did that, it was time to start doing zoo and wildlife. And I did a residency up at the Bronx Zoo, Wildlife Conservation Society, loved my time there, stayed on after my residency for several years. So that was the early days, and very formative and very fun and educational.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, Mark, as Dean of the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, what excites you most about the role veterinary medicine can play in addressing global challenges like public health, sustainability, and food systems?

Dr. Mark Stetter:
Well, Stacy, there’s so many examples of how veterinarians provide value to our world today. And I’ll just use a recent one over the last couple of years and let’s think about avian influenza and let’s think about how for decades veterinarians and scientists warned that we believe this virus which travels with birds around the world through migration is going to mutate at some point, is going to affect more than just birds, and is going to become a real public health issue. And so, it has always been really interesting to see how in the media things blow up. 20 years ago avian influenza people were very worried and then we forgot about it. And certainly, it has come back to haunt us as we think about how veterinarians are involved with infectious disease and public health and agriculture. AI is a great example.
We as a profession, and here at Davis we’re very involved with saying in South America about three, four years ago, “Hey, there are marine mammals that are dying from avian influenza along Patagonia and along the coast. And this is a warning sign. We’ve now got mammals that are getting avian influenza from the birds. They’re giving it to each other and they’re dying in large numbers.” And sure enough, a year later, what’s happening here in North America, it’s traveling to our agriculture. It’s traveling to dairies. And to our surprise, not only was it affecting dairies, but it was affecting dairy workers. And so, now it’s a disease that’s affecting people and domestic animals outside of agriculture. So we started seeing cats that were living at dairies that were drinking the milk and suddenly getting neurologic disease.
So for me, it’s a great example, and there are many, many others, that veterinarians play this really critical role in understanding animal health, public health, agriculture, the intersection of all these pieces. And whether it be as a clinician, as a scientist, as a food safety, security, regulatory person, we add great value there.

Stacy Pursell:
Yeah, veterinarians certainly do add great value and those are some great examples of that. Mark, your leadership has helped drive record-breaking growth in research funding and philanthropy. What strategies have been most effective in building that kind of momentum?

Dr. Mark Stetter:
Yeah, we’ve had a lot of success and I chalked that up to a couple of things. Number one, we need to do as a profession, a better job of telling our stories about how important we are to improve the world and society. And so, we spend a lot of time in telling that story and also in the relationships surrounding this. So whether that be through our clients that come through our hospital, through foundations, through people who are just interested in the same things that we are, we know that it is critical for people to understand what we do and how we add value.
And so, the recent success that we’ve had in philanthropy and funding, a lot of that is because people are now opening their eyes to the research that we do in animals that help human health. So our two largest gifts recently have really moved forward, because people get excited about what we’re doing at Davis in animal care, but also, hey, I didn’t understand before that when you look at new drugs for cancer, when you look at how stem cells can help animals, when you look at new orthopedic procedures, all of those things not only help the animals, but they’re hugely helpful in human health.
And so, if we think about ways that we can accelerate new drugs, new treatments to help humans get them through the FDA approval process, make sure that they’re safe and effective before we try them in people, let’s look at animals that get the same diseases and be able to evaluate them with animals and then really accelerate how we can get them out to the human market. So a lot of our work lately has been around telling our stories better, developing a relationship of trust so that people understand what we’re doing and why, and then be able to move that into a place of people helping us philanthropically so that we can do more.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, the concept of One Health is central to your work and you’ve touched on that on this podcast, but for listeners who may be unfamiliar, how do you explain it and why is One Health so important right now?

Dr. Mark Stetter:
Sure. Let’s face it, we’re becoming smarter and smarter about the overlap between health. And when I say overlap between health, our health is so critically tied to the environment that’s around us, so critically tied to animal health, and that we can’t work in these silos of having a physician work on a thing like avian influenza and then a veterinarian works separately and then an environmental person work separately. So we really need to think more broadly about everything that we do that allows us to solve these big problems in a way that breaks down some of the historical silos and lets us work together.
So our One Health Institute is really a world-renowned place that involves scientists working on infectious disease and pandemics, epidemiology of the overlap between animal health and human health. It also looks more broadly at, where are the gaps that veterinarians can help provide holistic care for people in society? So I’ll give you a recent example, which is our California Veterinary Emergency Team, that is a group of veterinarians, technicians, and staff that will respond to natural disasters across the State of California to help animals in need. So you can imagine a wildfire. We’ve got firemen, we’ve got people that will come in and help the people. They’re going to get them out of the fire safety. They’re going to treat them if they’re injured. They’re going to provide housing and shelter. But we as a society haven’t really thought about the animal component. What happens when you have a horse in the pasture or a dog in the building? And people aren’t going to leave their animals, right? And so, if we’re going to really deal with disaster response, we need to think about the whole picture.
And so, within our One Health Institute is this veterinary emergency team who can be dispatched out with a small animal clinic, with a mobile large animal clinic, with people that have the ability if a horse is freaked out because of the fire, they can go in and help tranquilize, and they have a trailer, they can move that horse to a safe place. Or if a dog dog has burns and needs to be treated or a cat has smoke inhalation, they have oxygen tanks and oxygen they can provide in a mobile mass unit. So I think of One Health as a way to combine all the different components of health across animals and people in an environment and how we should work together to help improve things.

Stacy Pursell:
That makes so much sense. Well, Mark, you started at Disney as a staff veterinarian providing hands-on medical care and eventually you led animal operations for more than 500 employees worldwide. How did your perspective on animal care change as you move from treating individual animals to shaping the systems responsible for their long-term welfare?

Dr. Mark Stetter:
Sure. I mean, for me, Disney was a wonderful experience. I really enjoyed working for the company and it was much different than anything I had experienced before between going to undergraduate veterinary school and residency. Here was a huge company that did so much more than animal care, which was I was a kid in a candy shop. I was a leader who had learned everything I could about zoo and wildlife medicine, but now there were opportunities to learn about how to build a team, what does conflict resolution look like? How do we manage large multimillion dollar projects? What does it mean when we say guest or customer experience and how do you manage a multimillion dollar budget and hundreds and hundreds of people in making sure that we’re all rowing in the same direction?
So I really loved my time there. There’s a place called Disney University, which actually has a course catalog that allowed us to go through and say, “I want to learn about project management,” or a long list of things that had nothing to do with veterinary medicine that really helped me grow as the Animal Kingdom was growing, as our team was growing, and as our work across the whole Disney company continued to explore. So it was a great experience for me.

Stacy Pursell:
While serving as director of animal operations, you were responsible not only for animal care, but also for creating memorable guest experiences at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. How did you balance the needs of the animals with the expectations of millions of visitors?

Dr. Mark Stetter:
Sure. And one of the things Disney is just really, really great at is combining fun and education, whether that be through their current media or going back many decades, Disney has always done a really nice job of making something fundamentally fun, but also having an educational component. And that’s really what we tried to do at the Animal Kingdom with a flare towards helping animals in the wild and conservation and how neat and cool these animals are.
And from a veterinary perspective, what was really unique then, and a lot of places have gone on to copy this, is we had a veterinary hospital that was open to the public. It still is and it was a place that if you wanted to see how you take care of a gorilla or understand how to do surgery on a turtle or what happens when you do a routine exam on a flamingo, you could watch all of that as a guest with big open windows every day. And it was a great way to be able to educate the public and to be able to take care of animals at the same time and to be able to really share a conservation message. And Disney continues to do, whether that be through other media in being able to share those stories through their various channels and Disney Plus and other things, or to continue to be able to now take what started at the Animal Kingdom and think about how to do that in new and fun and exciting ways.

Stacy Pursell:
I’ve had the privilege to get a backstage tour of the Animal Hospital and Animal Kingdom. It’s fascinating. Well, Mark, you developed and chaired Disney’s Animal Care and Welfare Committee. What were the biggest challenges in creating a welfare framework that could be applied across such a diverse collection of species?

Dr. Mark Stetter:
The easy part really was working with animal professionals. I think we all know that when we work with veterinarians or scientists or curators or zookeepers or aquarist, having a common understanding of how important it was to think about animal care and welfare and what its definition and value was, that was easy. What was more challenging over time was that the Disney company decided, “Hey, you guys are the animal experts, and that for the entire company, we would like you to be able to help guide from a brand management what is appropriate use of animals and entertainment or how we use storytelling and animals and making sure we don’t get in any trouble.”
And one of the famous examples in-house years ago when I was there was Finding Nemo. And Finding Nemo was a huge hit. Pixar did a fantastic job, still one of my favorite movies. But in that movie, you may remember that they have Nemo or the discussion around flushing a fish in the toilet and having the implication that it goes to the ocean. And the fact that there were millions of kids around the world that inadvertently were thinking, “Oh, freeing a fish by flushing at the toilet, this can happen.” And so, that was a great example of the folks who made the movie didn’t have this on their radar. And we were now at a time to better understand that there are animal components even in a cartoon that can inadvertently share things that we don’t want.
And so, we ended up as a group from the Animal Kingdom and Disney’s Animal Programs, being involved on a much larger level with the entire media company of Disney to be able to say, “Hey, for the next Nemo movie, we’re going to look at the script and make sure we’re not inadvertently putting things on there.” And I remember being in conversations with Jimmy Kimmel Show and others who were using animals to be part of their show and being able to help them guide, this is what’s appropriate from how we use animals to educate the public versus what might be perceived as something that’s inappropriate in our world. And we can all think back to where things were maybe 20, 30, 40 years ago with a circus and what was acceptable in animals and entertainment and what wouldn’t be acceptable now. And so, being able to help people with that thought process was really interesting.

Stacy Pursell:
That makes sense. The messaging is really important. Well, during your time overseeing international conservation programs at Disney, was there a project or partnership that particularly changed the way you think about the role that large organizations can play in protecting wildlife around the world?

Dr. Mark Stetter:
Sure. I mean, I think Disney, when it was starting the Animal Kingdom and just before and to this day, really became a strong model around how a US-based zoo can get involved with conservation around the world and have a big impact. And at that time, the Disney Wildlife Conservation Fund was an entire granting process through Disney that would help partner with people all over the world to help save endangered species and help wildlife in various places. And so, it was a great example of, for me, how a for-profit company can peel off a part of the profit and reinvest it in the mission, which was wildlife conservation, even though we were based in Orlando. So we had projects in Africa and Asia and South America. We were saving cotton-top tamarins in Columbia and working on sea turtles around the world and I personally got involved with elephants in South Africa. So it really was meaningful and continues on to flourish to this day.

Stacy Pursell:
Wow, that is fascinating. Well, you worked across zoos, academia, and global conservation efforts. What are some of the biggest lessons you’ve learned about collaboration across disciplines?

Dr. Mark Stetter:
I guess what I would say has been very obvious is that anybody, whether that be a scientist or professor or a different school and unit can create something meaningful and do that in a silo. But ultimately, you can’t have as big of an impact and you will not be as successful if you don’t think broadly about how you could work with people that are maybe outside of your discipline or work with people in different geographic areas or share resources that allows you to do something bigger and different. And I see that all the time with some folks that are either very concerned about resources and maybe donors in philanthropy, or scientists and ideas, or one organization saying, “I don’t want to work with another organization because that could dilute our impact.” But I would say that the most successful individuals and the most successful groups are those that think broadly about collaborating, and then the resources will come.

Stacy Pursell:
That’s so interesting. It makes so much sense. Well, with so many world-renowned centers under one umbrella at UC Davis, how do you encourage innovation and collaboration across such a large and diverse ecosystem?

Dr. Mark Stetter:
Well, the faculty are incredibly smart and entrepreneurial and coming up with great things. My job is to reduce any barriers and to give them the freedom to really explore whatever their areas of interest are. We have a variety of examples of how we try to do that. One recent one over the last couple of years is we know that our medical school and our veterinary school here at Davis are exceptional, but we’re probably about 20 minutes apart as far as… And we also are reinforced in many ways to just work within your discipline, maybe orthopedics, it might be oncology, whatever that is.
So I’ve worked with the leadership at the med school and here and we’ve developed this Across the Causeway, which is the road that separates us physically across the causeway annual retreat that brings together faculty from the medical school and the veterinary school to exchange ideas and to be able to collaborate in new and successful ways. And then we’ve incentivized that with seed grants. “So hey, if you’ve never worked together before, but want to do some research now, here’s a variety of grants that you can apply for that allow you to start this journey and to be able to do something fun and exciting.” So again, our faculty are there and excited. We just need to reduce any physical or financial or time-related barriers to let them do more.

Stacy Pursell:
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Dr. Mark Stetter:
Yeah, I guess reflecting on this question, I really want to emphasize for me personally, and I hope for others, that fun in the workplace has to be part of the equation if we’re going to be successful in coming into work and enjoying a team that likes working together.
And so, one example that we’ve had in our space here is we’ve created a series of videos that are educational fun and fun to make. We call them A Minute with Mark. They’re produced a couple of times a month. But we go to our faculty and we go across the school, we say, “Well, what are some really cool things that you want to tell our alumni, our donors, the general public? And we have one minute because of social media and the attention span of the world, we have on minute to make it fun and engaging, which means we’ve got to have visuals in this that really capture your attention, and then we’ve got to have fun facts, and our goal is to get people excited about something they didn’t know about and then come back to our website or come back to our school in some way and learn more.”
And so, we recently did one for graduation and capturing the energy and passion and excitement of our students and their families in that moment, and packaging it into a minute is always a very fun thing to be able to share. We’ve done one for some of our new buildings. We just opened an All Species Imaging Center. That All Species Imaging Center has CAT scans and MRIs and a bunch of fancy imaging equipment, and we basically went through that in a fun and exciting way. And I’m sure there are people out there that went, “Holy smokes, I didn’t know that you could put a horse into a CAT scan machine.” Or, “What does it look like if you take an X-ray of a large tortoise?” So we try to really do something that is interesting to everybody and that doesn’t have to be terribly scientific, but does raise awareness of what we do.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, it is important to have fun at work. Well, Mark, looking back at your time leading the College of Veterinary Medicine at Colorado State University, what were some of the most impactful changes you implemented?

Dr. Mark Stetter:
It has been really interesting to go back and visit, and Colorado State and the program there is phenomenal. It was the first place that I worked as an academic and was able to be a professor and a leader. So I really get a lot of fulfillment in being able to go back and seeing the things that we started and how they’ve really grown and been successful since then. The two things that I’m really proud of that have continued on, one would be to think about how we grow the veterinary space. And so, when I say that, we all know that there’s not enough veterinarians. It has been quite obvious for a decade now. And so, being able to now see their class size grow dramatically, have new education spaces, have a new primary care hospital, have a lot of the things that were just an idea and a dream 10 plus years ago and now to see it opening and the impact it will have, that’s really rewarding.
The other thing that has been really nice is that we had a concept there about a veterinary health system. So if you think about 20 years ago, a vet school or even a med school would have a classroom and a hospital, but everything has evolved with the specialties and the things that we can do, that typically you have a health system now. You would go visit for your medical care, especially if you’re going to go see a specialist, a health system that would include different buildings and different departments and different areas for what your needs are.
And so, we saw that same trend in veterinary medicine. And what we started and what they’ve been able to now execute on is a health system that brings together all of those different service components. So if you need reproductive help with your horse and you wanted to help make sure your horse got pregnant at the Equine Reproduction Lab, or if you needed diagnostic tests from the laboratory, or if you need clinical services in their large hospital, or if you needed continuing education, all these different service areas had been completely different and not conjoined in any meaningful way and not in a health system as you would experience if you went to a human academic campus.
So it has been really great, because we started the idea organizationally, and then pulling that together to go back and see that this veterinary health system now exists today and the service that it’s providing to the general public and how well it’s working.

Stacy Pursell:
Fascinating. Well, Mark, as someone deeply involved in both research and leadership, how do you balance advancing science with inspiring and mentoring the next generation of veterinary leaders?

Dr. Mark Stetter:
Well, one of the things that the team does here, certainly not my role, but I certainly am proud to see how well it’s expanding, is how we teach students about the importance of biomedical research, and if that is a career opportunity for them, how we can make that a reality. So our DVM-PhD program is a great example. We have students that might come in and apply during veterinary school and say, “I know going into the program, I want to do a DVM-PhD and I want to go into biomedical research,” and they can come in and go into that joint program that allows them to do them at the same time so it’s shorter. And then we also have students that are during their DVM program might say, “Holy smokes, I’ve decided I’m really interested in this and now I want to jump into the DVM-PhD program.”
And then we have students that are getting their regular veterinary degree, but that want to explore research during a summer project or during their time here on campus. And so, we have these great summer research programs that are paid and that allow them to work in different laboratories. Somebody might say, “Hey, I really want to learn about infectious disease, or I want to learn about ophthalmology, or I want to learn about cancer, I want to learn about lab animal medicine.” And we can connect those students with various faculty mentors and labs across, and then they get to spend the summer exploring different areas. So I love being able to have, I think we’ve got 40-some specialties here. So when I say that, it could be equine orthopedics, or behavior, or nutrition, or zoo and wildlife medicine, but there’s really nothing that you might be interested in that we can’t be able to connect you with in some meaningful way to be able to explore and see if that’s something you want to do as a career.

Stacy Pursell:
There are countless opportunities for veterinarians today. Well, for aspiring veterinarians or even professionals in other fields who want to make a broader impact on the world, what advice would you give them about building a purpose-driven career?

Dr. Mark Stetter:
I guess I always tell our pre-vet students, I think it’s really important to follow your passion, whatever that is. And people often think that they have to study something or explore something because it’s going to be the best way to be successful in a career that might have nothing to do with that. And I guess I believe strongly that, let’s talk about pre-vets for a moment, if you are really interested in molecular biology, if you’re really interested in literature, if you’re really interested in animal science, if you’re really interested in whatever it is, study that, work on that while you’re an undergrad, because you are much more likely to succeed in those classes and do well, which then is the avenue for you to get into veterinary school, versus a lot of folks who say, “Oh, I’m going to major in animal science,” or, “I’m going to major in something because I’m told that’s the best way to get into veterinary school.”
And I think, number one, it does you a disservice, because you’re less likely to do really well in the classes if you don’t find them interesting. And number two, if you don’t get into vet school, guess what? You’ve now studied something that doesn’t give you another career opportunity because you’re not that interested in it. But we have people coming here that have degrees in engineering, in literature, in ballet. It matters not. What matters is that you have a strong scientific foundation in addition to whatever you’re studying and that you did well academically, because you can do the perfect undergraduate major and get Cs and you’re not going to be able to get into vet school. So I think really exploring your passion is important.

Stacy Pursell:
That’s good advice. Mark, what has been the most surprising thing to you during your career in the veterinary profession?

Dr. Mark Stetter:
I think what has been really interesting in a positive, surprising way is how well you can pivot in veterinary medicine to do something different. So my first job out of veterinary school was working with small animals in Manhattan, New York. Suddenly I’m working with zoo and wildlife. Then I’m an executive at the Disney Company, thinking about the guest experience and visitors. Then I’m a professor at a university. And you can work in so many different areas in veterinary medicine, could be changing the types of critters that you work on. It could be whether you work for a profit or a nonprofit, whether you work in a certain geographic area, you could work overseas. So I love the fact that you can pivot and change your mind and you’re not locked into something for the rest of your career.

Stacy Pursell:
That’s great advice as well. Well, how have you seen the veterinary profession change over the years since you’ve been involved?

Dr. Mark Stetter:
Yeah, it’s interesting. I just provided the remarks for our commencement to our students and I was able to reflect. I went back and read All Creatures Great and Small after, I think 40, 50 years is the last time I read it in high school. And being able to reflect on what has changed in that 50 years and what has not, it was really interesting for me and I was able to share that with our graduates. But we know that technology is changing human medicine and the veterinary medicine follows along, whether that be how we’re using advanced imaging. Who would’ve though you could look inside an animal’s brain with an MRI and be able to see what’s going on in there, see, does it have a tumor? See if it’s working normally, does it have a blood clot? Without having to cut into it or do anything harmful, we can look inside organs and see what’s going on.
So technology has really changed and allowed us to do so much more. What hasn’t changed is that human-animal bond and the relationship that people have either with their ranch animals, their farm animals, their pets at home. So for me anyway, it’s really interesting to see the big things that have changed and the even bigger things that fundamentally I don’t think will ever change.

Stacy Pursell:
What does your crystal ball say about the future of the veterinary profession?

Dr. Mark Stetter:
Crystal ball? Boy, if you have one, can I borrow it sometime? I mean, what’s the obvious trends for me from what I can see is, number one, people love their pets, and the transition from a pet that 20, 30 years ago might’ve slept on the back porch and is now sleeping in our beds. And the fact that the human race seems to be getting more and more anxious about the world that’s around them. And when I say that, mental health and anxiety and loneliness are increasingly a problem and pets fill a huge gap. So I see that continuing to be a really important place that animals have in our world and how veterinarians get involved.
We’re also seeing just in the last couple of years, which is unexpected, but with GLP-1s and with human health and nutrition, protein has become an even bigger deal. And 20, 30 years ago, you might’ve bet that red meat and protein was going to be less of an issue, and that veggie burgers, that might have taken over. But boy, there’s just a huge increase now both in the US, but I anticipate globally in animal protein and human health and nutrition. And so, again, that will put even more pressure on food safety, security, and the veterinarian’s role in helping make sure that we have safe protein from a nutrition perspective.
So I think those are the other ones. And then the crystal ball certainly is showing that technology and AI are going to change everything about our world and we’re seeing bits and pieces of that in veterinary medicine. Some of it is obviously going to help us, whether that be scribes that reduce the amount of time we spend in the clinic or the office, and other things I think we just don’t know yet.

Stacy Pursell:
What are a few of your daily habits that you believe have allowed you to achieve success along the way?

Dr. Mark Stetter:
Yeah, I think any advice I might give is that reminding ourselves that our career in veterinary medicine is a marathon and not a sprint, in that we need to take care of ourselves. And if you look at successful marathon runners, marathon is a lot of prep work, a lot of self-care, a lot of training, and then a lot of care after the fact to make sure that you just keep going. And we have a tendency to sprint and not do enough self-care and then be exhausted afterwards and not ready to run the next race. And so, I think wherever we can is to understand, how do we take care of ourselves for the long haul and how do we pace ourselves so that we don’t burn up?

Stacy Pursell:
I am guilty of that myself. I tend to have one speed and that’s go. What has been the biggest challenge you’ve encountered throughout your career?

Dr. Mark Stetter:
Well, that’s a great question. I would say the biggest challenges are always the unexpected ones. And so, whether it be a really big project that you have a lot of people and a lot of resources and a lot of plans and all of a sudden something unexpectedly comes up, those are the ones that are always, I think the biggest hit as far as unexpected and take you back and then have to figure out how to recovery.
I have lots of examples. I think the one that everybody can probably reflect on is what happens when a pandemic closes our world? So I guess I was very impressed with how much the pandemic affected us. There was all of us that started with the first week of, “Oh, this is unknown, this is anxiety-ridden, this is a problem, but we’ll figure it out in the next couple of weeks.” And then years later where we still were trying to figure out what does this mean for global travel, for educating students, for delivering service, for how do we live with our families, all these kinds of things?
So I guess those are the things that, unexpected huge challenges that test us. But I mean, look now five years later, we figured it out. And I’m not saying that we’re ready for the next pandemic or that anybody wants that, but I would say if you look at the educational space, we all said, “Holy smokes, how are we going to teach students without putting them in a classroom?” Okay, we figured it out. We said, “How are we going to teach students surgery without putting them in these different areas?” And we figured out we can actually set up your iPhone above a silicon model and watch you tie your suture knots, and whether that be live or recorded, make sure that you’re learning how to do different suture patterns and do it well before we bring you in in a much smaller group than the large group and to be able to do individualized learning.
And so, we didn’t see compromised care. We didn’t see people not able to graduate. We didn’t see years later that veterinarians that left after the pandemic couldn’t do their work. What we saw was a need to be flexible and creative and deal with the stress that was associated with that. It was stressful for the students. It was stressful for the faculty, the staff, the families. We were just talking about our first commencements, I guess about three, four years ago now after two years of not having commencements and how we missed that coming together and being able to celebrate. So I think that was a very long-winded way of saying there will be lots of unexpected challenges that we will get through.

Stacy Pursell:
But you improvised through it all. Well, what advice would you give the younger version of yourself?

Dr. Mark Stetter:
I think what I try to do better now and would’ve told myself over the last 60 years is, “Hey, really enjoy the moment.” I think many of us, and certainly I have been guilty of this, have looked at achieving something, and without really enjoying the moment or celebrating or taking a couple seconds or minutes to absorb the magnitude and the privilege of what’s going on, we just check it and move on.
And so, I think back of my time working with a lot of animals in the zoo and wildlife space and there was a long list of animals that I would work with every day. And let’s say I was anesthetizing a giraffe to do a hoof trim and a procedure on that and we would have a big group of people, “And you’re in charge of anesthesia, you’re in charge of this, you’re in charge of that.” We would do it all, wake the animal up from its procedure, onto the next case. Now we’re looking at a crocodile. And I look back at that and I always think, what a privilege it was and what a moment it was to be able to do those various things with the animals and how unique and special they were and the team that I worked with. But I was moving on to the next thing without really appreciating enjoying every moment, which I think I would do better at.

Stacy Pursell:
What message or principle do you wish you could teach everyone listening to our podcast today?

Dr. Mark Stetter:
I never was involved with psychology, the courses of psychology or the principles of psychology when I was in high school or undergrad or vet school. I always considered it, I don’t know, a soft science or I wasn’t quite sure what it was about, but I’ve really grown to appreciate as I work with large teams and work with people, and certainly veterinarians work with people just as much as they work with animals, if not more. And so, understanding human behavior, for me, I’m talking when you ask, what are the things I could teach everyone? It’s about positive psychology. And positive psychology really being this growing field that shows that optimism, positivity have a huge ripple effect on our work and the people around us and our success. And so, I guess I would really say that that is something I explored later in my career. I probably had a little bit of that gene anyway as far as positivity, but being able to really understand the science behind positive psychology and be able to incorporate it in the workplace is a principle I would love to teach everybody.

Stacy Pursell:
Positivity goes a long way. Well, Mark, some of our guests say they’ve had a key book they read that helped them along the way. Do you have a book in your life that has impacted you the most?

Dr. Mark Stetter:
Well, I think it probably depends on what part of my journey I’ve been on. There certainly have been many, both fictional and other books that have helped me. Early on we mentioned All Creatures Great and Small and some of the Jacques Cousteau, which was much more of a TV show. I would say later in my career as I learned about some of these other ways to work with teams, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People was one of the first books that I picked off the shelf that didn’t have anything to do with veterinary medicine. It seems like for the first 30 years it was around reading scientific journals and book chapters about animals. And as I started to explore ways to work with large groups of people, that was probably a really influential book.

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

Dr. Mark Stetter:
Okay, mic drop moment. Good question. I guess I would share, is we often don’t reflect, but we need to remember that we can do anything. And when I say we can do anything, veterinarians are amazingly versatile and resilient in being able to literally… I mean, who could work with a frog and a fish one minute, a dog and a cat the next, a horse and a cow, an elephant and a giraffe, and go work in the middle of a field and forest or go work in a high-end veterinary clinic, go work in a boardroom, go work for a large pharmaceutical company, go work in any area of the world that you can imagine and add value and find it exciting? So I just am always impressed with the breadth of work that we do and the abilities that we have to solve problems that are important to society and to making it a better world. So mic drop, as veterinarians you can do anything.

Stacy Pursell:
Veterinarians can do anything. And Mark, you have certainly had an incredible career. It has been a pleasure to have you as my guest today on The People of Animal Health Podcast. Thank you for being here with me today.

Dr. Mark Stetter:
Thank you, Stacy. Have a great weekend.