I was in the Army Reserve for only 9 months when I was deployed to Afghanistan as the Officer-in-Charge of the Veterinary Unit at Kandahar Air Field. Before I left I had to undergo training as a food inspector as well as specific training on how to work on Military Working Dogs. It turns out that in the Army, veterinarians run two teams of technicians and split their duties between food inspections and work on animals. My food inspector team was larger–6 food technicians and we were in charge of verifying that the food was safe upon arrival. It was a fulltime job inspecting enough food to feed the 20,000 people on KAF. That was during the day.
My other fulltime job was caring for the Military Working Dogs, which were mostly Belgian Malinois. These are super smart dogs unlike the German Shepards that were mostly used in previous wars, the Malinois can tell friend from foe. Once they were introduced to me, they knew I was their friend. Here I am hugging a couple that came in to meet me for a physical exam before they headed out on night patrol. If they were injured, I was called up in the middle of the night and met them with their Dog Handler so I could work on them. It was completely exhausting to be working day and night for 7 days a week.
As you can imagine, I had never left home and my children before and have always been a home body. Here I was at the age of 52 deploying for the first time with no prior Army service having been commissioned under an age waiver because the Army needed veterinarians so badly. I won’t lie, it was the hardest and most terrifying thing I had ever done up to that point in my life. But the Army trained me how to inspect food to verify its safety. I have always enjoyed seeing how things were made, and inspecting food meant I would go behind the scenes to food manufacturing plants. When I used my GI Bill (an entitlement from my combat deployments) to get my Masters in Food Safety, I focused my research for my Masters Project on Pet Food Safety.
So this is how I got from being a private practitioner for 25 years to an Army Veterinarian for 12 years, and now to a Pet Food Safety specialist. I discovered that there is very little information about pet food manufacturing and hardly any that explains to pet owners exactly what goes into pet food. I am excited to share this knowledge with all pet lovers.
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