With care for only a goldfish in his personal background, Ben Brainard somehow embarked on his college journey with the idea of becoming a veterinarian. But even a ways into vet school he realized he knew very little about how the profession works. Find out how figuring out who we want to care for is often a path to contentment.
Guest Ben Brainard had cared for only a goldfish before getting to college but he somehow had the idea of becoming a veterinarian. He thinks it might have been on account of reading James Harriot’s tales of days spent bucolically going from farm to farm treating animals of all sizes. But even after doing the pre-med track and shadowing vets in Vermont he still didn’t have the full picture of what a diary animal doctor did. In vet school he discovered much of the reality of that work was caring for the farm rather than the individual animals and he realized he needed to switch gears. Going into critical care for people’s pets, he got to exercise his interests in both problem solving on the fly and communicating with people. Along the way he needed to negotiate with the person closest to him and ultimately decide on caring for his own.
In this episode, find out from Ben how figuring out who we want to care for is often a path to contentment…on Roads Taken with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
About This Episode’s Guest
Ben Brainard is currently Edward H. Gunst Professor of Small Animal Critical Care at the University of Georgia College of Veterinary Medicine, where he is also director of clinical research. He is an expert in fish anesthesia, coagulation, and--as we heard earlier--dealing with primates of all sorts through the Great Ape Heart Project. Ben and his wife are raising their inquisitive daughter in Athens, Georgia. And though he seems to have put his basement band dreams to rest with Vegetative Propagation, he thankfully still wears bow ties.
For another story centered on caring for creatures great and small (and even our own), listen to ourepisode with Liz Rawson.
Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com
Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley
Music: Brian Burrows
Email the show at RoadsTakenShow@gmail.com
Ben Brainard: People always say that, well, you become a veterinarian because you're a misanthrope and don't want to deal with people. And, as I found out, a lot of being a veterinarian is absolutely dealing with people, probably even more so than dealing with their pets. And so communication, and things like that, ends up being such a really important part of how you practice medicine.
Leslie Jennings Rowley: With care for only a goldfish in his personal background, Ben Brainard somehow embarked on his college journey with the idea of becoming a veterinarian. But even a ways into vet school he realized he knew very little about how the profession works. Find out how figuring out who we want to care for is often a path to contentment on today's Roads Taken, with me Leslie Jennings Rowley.
Today I'm here with my friend Ben Brainard, and we are going to talk about all creatures great and small and how those creatures and new ones along the way lead us to who we are. So Ben, thank you so much for being here.
BB: Great. Thanks so much for having me, Leslie. I'm excited to, I don't know, muse about things.
LJR: Muse, you've always been good at musing. So I'm gonna give you two questions on which to muse at the beginning and they are these: When we were in college, who were you? And when we were getting ready to leave, who did you think you would become?
BB: It's a funny question because I think I showed up at college very much torn between arts and sciences. I had kind of my fingers in both. I was pretty good at science, but also really enjoyed music and did a lot of musical things. And then when I got to college, I actually thought that it was time to, how shall I put it? For some reason, I felt that I sort of arrived and it was time to do work. And so I signed up for a lot of classes in sort of a pre-med type of a vein and kind of ignored the arts with one notable exception—obviously our well-known band.
LJR: One of my favorites.
BB: That did not, we were unable to parlay that into a recording career. So thankfully, you know, I did the pre-med classes. But on reflection, I probably focused a little bit too hard in getting all the pre-med stuff out of the way initially and missed out on some opportunities in terms of actually taking advantage of college. But I did know, you know, I came in really having the idea of…I think I actually wanted to go to vet school when I arrived. I can't actually remember if I told anyone that. But I had sort of read adequate amounts of James Herriot and
LJR: James Herriot, the All Creatures Great and Small guy, right?
BB: Mm-hmm. Yes.
LJR: Your role model?
BB: Yeah. Was going to become a veterinarian and drive around Vermont and, you know, take care of people's cows and such. So I was pretty focused when I got here on that. And, and that's actually where I was aiming when I mean, when I was leaving. I mean, to be perfectly honest with you, I had no idea what a veterinarian, being a veterinarian was about. We had a fish growing up,
LJR: That's all?
BB: We had one fish who miraculously lived all, you know, 20 year, 18 years that I was at home. You know, every once in a while we'd come back from a vacation and the pattern, the color pattern was a little. Like, maybe that fish had been replaced by a different fish. But my parents kept up the charade. So we basically had a fish growing up. No other pets. And so the whole veterinarian thing is actually still a little bit of a mystery to me, but I think it's probably from reading James Herriot and just wanting to be out in the country somewhere.
LJR: Wow. . So no cows and such in your life?
BB: No, in suburban New Jersey there was nothing.
LJR: All right. So when you were getting ready to leave, did you go directly to vet school?
BB: Yeah, I got into vet school December of our senior year, and then essentially moved straight from Dartmouth to West Philadelphia, which was also a little bit of a change of scenery. I had to lock my door.
LJR: Yeah, no cows there either.
BB: Yeah, no, absolutely no cows. And, and you know, Penn, so the vet school is at the University of Pennsylvania, and so most of the classes are downtown, but obviously you can't, I mean, historically the people would bring their horses into the middle of Philadelphia to be seen at the vet school, and then at some point they bought a farm out near Westchester, Pennsylvania. And so all of the large animal activities happened out in Westchester. And so as a student, you were frequently, you know, like having to drive back and forth from West Philadelphia to the bucolic country and back and forth. So yeah, it was kind of interesting.
LJR: And I wanna go through your whole vet school journey and all of that, but I can't let you off so easily about our four years together, because I think I might have known that you were premed. I'm not sure I did. I probably did. But what I think of Ben as is this like…your allocution and your wit and repartee precedes you into any room. And that I don't necessarily associate with the sciences because those people are buried in books. So where, where did that come from? Where did that get honed with you and do you see elements of it kind of pervading the idea of vet school? Cuz you don't, I don't think the horses or the dogs or the fish really care about kind of banter.
BB: No. The cats care. But yeah, you're right. The rest of them... Well, you know, I was, so, I ended up being one course shy of a drama degree as well, so like, I...
LJR: Seriously?
BB: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I did in addition, so after sort of doing this mistake first year and loading up on all, I don't know, like multi-variable calculus stuff that I thought was like the next step after high school, but in reality, I should have just slowed down and took advantage of stuff. But anyway, yeah, so I did, I was recently involved in drama at Dartmouth and did a bunch of…I didn't do too much acting. I was in a couple of plays and then I did sound for a couple others. So, you know, there's that aspect, but I guess it was perhaps hidden from others. But, and you're right. I mean, it's completely, well, it's not completely antithetical to being a veterinarian because, you know, the people always joke. I think Liz Rawson said this as well when you talked to her, but you know, people always say that, well, you go, you become a veterinarian because you're a misanthrope and don't want to deal with people. And as I found out, a lot of being a veterinarian is absolutely dealing with people, probably even more so than dealing with their pets per se. And so communication and things like that ends up being such a really important part of how you interact, how you just how you practice medicine, that I think actually there's some carryover of that desire to talk to people, desire to interact with people. Aand sometimes it's not really…I guess more of the acting probably ends up in the fact that I've now ended up in academic veterinary medicine. And so now if I have a class of 150 students, you know, to me that's always much more of a performance than, you know, it's a lecture, but it's more of a performance. And so I, I think I've actually managed to keep a lot of that stuff with me, even though it's not on my day-to-day, you know, taking care of pets and things like,
LJR: Yeah. Yeah, I, I'm sure that's true and we'll, we'll touch back on that. Okay, so back to Philadelphia, gritty Philadelphia, but going out to a farm. Because your intention was the James Harriet model of being out in among the large beings. How long did that take to change or shift with you?
BB: Yeah, that's actually, it's, it's really interesting because even the, so I volunteered with the vet clinic while I was at Dartmouth and rode around with them and we would see, you know, people's horses. And again, it was, I mean, it was beautiful. Mind you, some of the barns these people had were nicer than where I'm currently living. But, you know, it was wonderful. And the, and the cows, they were relatively small herds or they were individual horses, individual pets. And so, from that perspective I was still well on sort of the James Herriot thing. And then it's when you get to vet school and you start, so I, I went in there kind of wanting to do dairy, like you choose sort of a major or a track, and I was kind of food animal, dairy focused. And at some point it became clear to me that, that individual that you were treating in the context, especially of larger dairies like they have in Pennsylvania, the patient is actually the farm. It's not the individual animal. [LJR: Mm-hmm.] And so there's a lot less of, oh, this cow has been a little bit off. Let's see what we can do to fix it. And much more of the overall milk production is down. Can we change something in the diet to replace a mineral or something that's missing to help the cows produce? And I was much less excited. About dealing with the farm than I was in dealing with the individual animals. And, and I mean we, we still had some of that, there were some pretty small farms around, you know, especially out in Westchester, you know, barns without electricity, where you'd go in there to look at the cow and they'd have a kerosene lamp and you're like, I'm pretty sure there was a song about this in Chicago. I had…bad idea…you know, just visions of dying in a conflagration of you know, with a cow and a barn somewhere in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania. But, so that was okay. But it was really the thing that caused me to move a little bit away from the dairy stuff, and to focus a little bit more on small animal medicine, is you got to interact with an individual patient. An individual family who's brought their pet. And that for me was a lot, a lot more rewarding, I guess on a, you know, on a day-to-day basis than treating the farm. But again, probably if I'd known anything before going to vet school, I would've known this before I started. But again, going back to the fish, I really didn't have a great understanding of what I was getting into, which is advice now I tell people who want to go to vet school is, you know, if you think you want to do something, do a little bit of research and figure out exactly what it's gonna look like when you, you know, when you're actually a practitioner.
LJR: Yeah. Yeah. So for those of us who are not as well versed in this part of medicine as maybe other things, what is the process in vet school and when do you have to decide and what kind of, kind of pivots can you make once you're in, have selected a stream?
BB: Well, I will say it's actually a great degree. You can pivot as much as you want. I mean, there are veterinarians in all aspects of life, from food production to food science, to wildlife to ecology. People I grad that were in my graduating class are, you know, got a PhD and are doing research. Some are doing chickens, like all they do is chickens all day. Some, you know, working for industry. Other people do research for industry. So it's actually as a, as far as a degree goes, it's actually really easy to change courses even, you know, 10, 20 years after you graduate. So that's nice. So in order to be a practicing veterinarian, you only need four years of veterinary school. So in the US that is a postgraduate degree. And you get either a DVM or if you're funny and you go to UPenn, you go to VMD. You don't need to do, like in, in the human medicine, you'll, you need to do an internship and a residency before you can kind of go out and practice. And in the course of doing that, you specialize in kind of progressively more focused areas. Veterinarian, you can graduate from vet school the next day, go out, hang up a shingle and start seeing animals. So there's not a requirement for any post-graduate training. Now, if you want to, and this is the course that I ended up going, if you want to, you can pursue internships and residencies in, in various specialties. And so that's when you become a specialist in surgery or medicine or like I did critical care and anesthesia. So that is something that you can do, but, but for an average veterinarian, you just go to vet school and graduate and start practicing right away.
LJR: Yeah. So I think that change that you decided to make first recognizing that you were on the path to treating a farm rather than an individual living, breathing being, and that, of course would change the timbre of conversations that you were having with the humans that we talked about earlier, right? This is more about the farm and the business. This is more. My psychology and my relationship with this animal. So you were pulled to the latter and very interesting that you chose the critical care aspect because that is more probably psychology than likely any other—I mean maybe oncology, I don't know. But it seems like there'd be a lot of, of meaty conversations that you'd need to have quickly and then after the fact. So what was the thinking about why that appealed to you?
BB: So, it's funny, if you look at my, I was just looking at my transcript from vet school and I basically did like a bunch of dairy. So, so the fourth year I guess we should say the first three years of vet school are classroom based, and then the fourth year is a practicum. And so you rotate in the teaching hospital or on externships with veterinarians doing their job. And so when I look at my fourth year, half of it was spent, you know, essentially working with cows and dairy, and the rest of it was in the ICU, which are probably about as diametrically opposed as you could get. You know, I think the critical care appealed to me—you're right, the fact that you have to really make very rapid decisions that are quite consequential, and then also, you know, trying to discuss really complex pathophysiology of disease in a way that an owner can understand what's happening with their pet. I really like that challenge. And overall, you know, I think the, the other reason that veterinary medicine appealed to me in general, I think was also, you know, you don't get any feedback from your patient. You know, I mean, they bite you occasionally, but, so I'm sure perhaps similar to some pediatric practitioners. But, you know, the, the mystery or the challenge of, you know, figuring out what actually is wrong when you don't have a lot of feedback from the actual patient I think is really challenging and critical care in particular is to me just the logical extension of that challenge of you need to figure this out and, you know, you have an animal who's honestly really quite ill that you need to fix. So I think that that challenge appealed to me, and it's kind of the, you know, similar to I think just asking questions and trying to work through logical progressions of disease in your head—that's very challenging and very rewarding, I think.
LJR: Mm-hmm. So Ben, was it the externship process that led you to Georgia?
BB: No. So , as I said, if you wanna specialize. And so by the end of of fourth year of vet school, I'd kind of decided I was gonna specialize in critical care. And so the first step to doing to getting a residency is to pursue an internship. And veterinary medicine has a match just like human medicine. And so you basically, you get some letters of reference, you submit your letter and it goes into a big pot. And who knows exactly what happens in the ether. And then you get assigned to a place, you know, basically you match with the program. And so I matched with Georgia. I'd never been to Georgia. I was quite concerned, I should say, cuz Philadelphia is quite close to the Mason Dixon line. And it was the furthest south I had ever been and I was, so, I was pretty concerned about moving to Philly, that it was too far south. And then, yeah, then I matched in Georgia and yeah. Slight unseen, like I'd never been here before.
LJR: So, but it seemed to have worked out for you because that was more than 20 years ago. Yes. I, I, so internship was a year. And so I was here in like 2000 and I mean it, the best part about, it's in Athens, Georgia. It's a music town. There's, you know, any night of the week you can go into town and see live music. It was a great place to be an intern. Also, the cost of living's really low cause they pay interns like, you know, like $3 a day or something. So yeah, it was a great place. I really enjoyed the town and the vet school was, I mean, it's probably, it's up and coming, I guess, is how I'd characterize it. And you could tell then; it was just a good group of people. And so I was here in, I guess that would've been 2000, 2001. And then you go back into the match for residencies. And so then I matched back at Penn to do critical care. And then I also did at Penn an anesthesia residency as well. So those I kind of did concurrently. And then after that finished in 2006 and then it was, okay, where do you want to go? And there was a job opening in Georgia and I really had a good time here. So we thought we'd come back for a couple years.
LJR: It's turned out to be quite, quite a couple years. And in that time though, Ben, you had two kind of changes in your life. One: you moved, you were still doing the work that you'd been doing and probably listening to a lot of great music, but kind of veered toward the academic side. So there's that, and then there's this other near simultaneous, maybe not quite, you, in addition to looking after pets in critical care, you have other critical beings that you're attached to in your own life namely a wife and child. So talk me through both of those things. I don't know if they're intertwined in your head or the way you approach them, but…
BB: So I met my, my wife is an equine surgeon and so I met her during residency and so we finished residency together and, you know, so…We were not married at the time. And I said, you know, so what do you think about Georgia? She incidentally has no interest in music or any of the other like, fun stuff that I liked about Athens. So it was a little bit of a discussion, I guess is probably the best way to put it. And that's why we sort of had a two year plan, so, She came down as an emergency equine surgeon, so her job was taking care of primarily colics. Any large animals, horses that would come in needing emergency care. And then I, with another colleague, we were in charge of founding the critical care program at Georgia. So the program didn't exist before. [LJR: Oh, wow.] 2006. So we actually started the emergency room and the ICU and eventually a residency program here to train others. So, you know, it was a very attractive job also from the idea of you can go and make your own program and, and [LJR: mm-hmm] help to really bring the hospital here forward. So that was one part of that, you know, that was the two year plan.
Anyway, the academic thing is interesting and so it is, you know, when you finish your residency, you can be a specialist and you can go practice in that particular specialty wherever you want. You can, you know, join a private practice or continue to work at a university. And working at a university has its pros and cons obviously. One of the big things for me that was a pro is that there was a big research enterprise in Georgia and I still had a lot of questions and it's hard not to have questions when practicing, you know, when you're dealing with, you know, sick animals every day you, why am I doing this? Is there is there a better way to do this, for instance, things like that. And so the ability to continue on a research path while at the same time seeing patients and working in a hospital was, was very attractive. And private practice doesn't really offer a research component to it. And so, that more than anything kind of kept me in academics, but then there's also the teaching and we've already acknowledged that I quite enjoyed just kind of standing in front of a group of people talking, what can I do? That was kind of a bonus, but I really fell into sort of the academic…It suited, it ticked off a lot of boxes in terms of what I ultimately wanted to do in terms of really helping to move veterinary medicine forward, both from training the young minds as well as pursuing research in that context.
LJR: Yeah. But that whole enterprise takes much more than two years. So how did that negotiation go?
BB: You know, it's a nice place to live here.
LJR: Even if you don't like music.
BB: Yeah, yeah. And also living in the south eventually makes you weak and unable to tolerate colder temperatures. And so, you know, like there was a job at Wisconsin I was pretty excited about, and my wife's like, yeah, you know what is pretty good here, we're just gonna stay here. It's warm. So yeah, be, and the, the other challenging part of course is, , you know, when there's two of us, now, instead of negotiating for one job, you're trying to parlay potentially two academic jobs. I mean, either of us can go into private practice, and so it's not an ultimate problem. But at the same time, you know, we both like teaching and being involved in a teaching hospital sort of aspect, and so that also has a tendency to keep you in one spot.
LJR: Yeah. As do children. And so that came a little later for you than maybe some of us. Not so long ago. I mean, it's hilarious and, you know, listening to this podcast, it. You know, the fact that there are some people who are sending their kids off to college, and then there are other people who have like newborns. And so I'm, I feel like I'm in a reasonable group here, but I'm easily 10 years older than like all of our kids' parents. Like it's just, it's cracks me up. So, yeah, so she's seven right now. And so we actually didn't have children until we were both, I think we had both actually become professors at that point. So we were like, well, I guess we're mostly stable in our jobs, so I guess we can go ahead and have children. Yeah, it's very fun. Like I definitely feel like I am too old to be having a seven year old.
LJR: No. No. So I mean, like I suppose you don't want any of your day job to have informed your parenting style because you're a critical care person and your wife is a surgeon. But are there any correlates you can see that might have been helpful for you, particularly as a kind of parent coming to this later in your life.
BB: No. It's funny, I'm glad I'm not a pediatrician cause I can't imagine doing that. It's, it's really more like, you know, should we take the dog into the vet because he is…You know, he's vomited three times. Maybe it's time to get, you're like, well, he looks all right. We can wait. Another, I don't know that we've done that with the, with the child. I think she, but she has been exposed, like, she comes to work and it's like going to the zoo cuz we see everything and so we have, we can have birds or lizards or turtles or whatever in the emergency room. Dogs and cats, and then she can go out with her mother and see the goats and sheep and horses and stuff. So it's, you know, like she enjoys coming to work, you know, when that's an option. And, you know, she, she has a pretty nice microscope at home. The, so she's probably, we're biasing a little bit more on the science stuff, but we're like, yeah, let's, let's see what this is under the microscope. You know, it's, the other thing that's interesting is cuz we're teaching students all day, both of us. And so the, the age of those students are, you know, kind of early twenties by and large. And so sometimes we'll come home and be like, if you're ever like this when you grow up, it's not gonna be okay. And so, some of our teaching, our discussions at home are more focused on: Let's learn how to ask a question and be a be a critical thinker and stuff like more that than anything.
LJR: So Ben, I'm gonna take you back then to that 20-something-year-old you in college and you had this idealized version of what veterinary medicine may be. And if this version, today's version of Ben went back and said, okay buddy, let me tell you what it's been like and where you're gonna end up. What would the younger version have thought about that?
BB: Well, you know, so it's a funny question cuz as I said I had no clue what I was doing really at all or that any of this academic stuff even existed in the veterinary context. From that perspective though, I think it ticks a lot of boxes cuz again, I, it encompasses, I think I was always very kind of academic focused research interested. You know, like my senior spring, I just spent doing research. And it wasn't even enrolled in classes and stuff like that. And so I think that it would actually jive pretty well with, you know, I guess my 20 year old me would be like, oh, that's kind of cool. I didn't know you could do that. But, you know, it, it really has, has ended up being a, a job that has been pretty flexible and also, has, you know, it's interesting. I mean, some days they'll go in anesthetize a gorilla and you know, like, you know, sometimes these things happen and, and they just need help.
LJR: What?
BB: Well, that's the anesthesia part. See? We, we skipped over the anesthesia training, but Okay, let's go back there because I cannot leave the…I was gonna say the gorilla in the room. Yeah, but…what?
BB: Well, so when you train in veterinary anesthesia, You know, essentially to, when you sit your boards, they will pick a, you know, patient and ask you how to anesthetize it. So you have to be conversant in appropriate anesthesia for fish or giraffes or gorillas or dogs. And so yeah, it's very, I mean, we can talk for another hour about some of this stuff. But it's an exciting part. Like I went to Cameroon with a group and we anesthetized 50 chimpanzees and gorillas to look at their cardiac function cuz gorillas in the US in captivity get heart disease. And it's kind of a weird heart disease. And then mostly it's diagnosed postmortem. [LJR: Postmortem.] And so the idea is can we come up with some criteria to diagnose those chimps or gorillas who are at risk before they die from heart disease. Can we diagnose them and treat them? And so we went and anesthetized a bunch of animals and did echocardiograms and looked at their heart function and things like that. So the anesthesia part of my training is, I mostly….I'm the anesthesia advisor for what's called the Grade Ape Heart Project, which is actually a funded project that aims to study this heart disease, in gorillas, well in captive apes—so, gorillas, orangutans, bonobos, and chimps. It's a group of scientists, veterinarians, pathologists that are all working to try and figure out why heart disease happens. And so I got a nod and I get to play anesthesiologist in that group every once in a while. Again, I guess it's a pretty good job.
LJR: Yeah, I was gonna, I was thinking back to that 20-year-old Ben. Like he'd be like, what? Yes. That's cool. And the question: do Cameroonian gorillas have this same thing?
BB: Well, yeah. So there was a theory that says there's a dietary component to it. And so the reason we went to Cameroon is because they were eating primarily more a normal gorilla chimpanzee diet as opposed to whatever we're feeding them in the [LJR: Yeah.] US zoos. Of those animals, most of their hearts were what we would consider to be normal, at least looking at it with the ultrasound. So it's a little bit hard to tell, you know, we were hoping to sort of follow those same animals and see if any of them do eventually develop heart disease and stuff like that. I haven’t been able to see if we can go back to Cameroon and to do it again. But I'd absolutely go and do that cause they're all part of a wildlife refuge there. So people keep track of them and we know, you know, what their history is. But people are looking at metabolic causes, so looking at their cholesterol, and there's a number of different hypotheses that people are looking at to try and to try and figure these out.
LJR: Well take that. James Herriot, I say, yeah.
BB: Yeah. It's definitely, yeah, and like I said, it's a very flexible degree. You can…
LJR: Yeah, exactly. Well, Ben, I am so thrilled that you kind of shared where you've been with this degree and this life and these choices. It's all fascinating and I'm very glad to hear that you're still bantering, whether it be with people in the field or pet owners in distress, or seven-year-olds who are, I'm sure, going to make very good critical decisions in their lives. So Ben, thank you so much for being part of this.
BB: Well, thanks so much, Leslie. It was great to see you and great to catch up.
LJR: That was Ben Brainard who is currently the Edward H. Gunst Professor of Small Animal Critical Care at the University of Georgia College of Veterinary Medicine, where he is also director of clinical research. He is an expert in fish anesthesia, coagulation, and--as we heard earlier--dealing with primates of all sorts through the Great Ape Heart Project. (See links that project in the show notes.) Ben and his wife are raising their inquisitive daughter in Athens, Georgia. And though he seems to have put his basement band dreams to rest with Vegetative Propagation, he thankfully still wears bow ties.
We are sure as you have been listening to our podcast you have been reflecting on things that have changed about you over the years and those which have stayed the same. As the new year dawns and you look ahead at the person you may become in the future, wishing you great health, happiness and adventures from me, Leslie Jennings Rowley, on your Roads Taken.
BB: The dogs are gonna howl. [Concertina plays. Dogs howl.]
LJR: I hear the band now.
BB: It’s okay. It’s alright. Ok. It’s alright.