The veterinarians at Willow Animal Hospital in Ashland, Wis., aim to service and care for their clients’ animals in a Christ- centered environment.

The patient is a horse with a wound inside its groin — an unusual place for a nasty sore. The horse doesn’t seem bothered enough by pain to limp or slow down. But after three weeks of antibiotics, the wound is still draining, not healing up as it should.

How can a veterinarian diagnose the ailment and decide on a cure?

Steve Meyer, doctor of veterinary medicine, of Willow Animal Hospital in Ashland, Wis., says that attentiveness to subtleties is the only way to understand and treat patients who can’t tell him what’s wrong.

“I look for clues (symptoms mostly) people wouldn’t notice,” Meyer said.

Growing up, Meyer never thought about being a veterinarian. He always had enjoyed working with animals, but after finishing high school, he worked construction, went into the Army and then figured he ought to attend college.

“I was in my second year of college when it finally hit me that I wanted to be a vet,” Meyer said. “I had the impression that I wanted to work in an area of need.”

He soon decided to become the fifth vet in a practice in Little Falls, Minn.

After a couple of years in which he gained a lot of veterinary experience, he was agitated. With so many animal hospitals in the area, he felt he wasn’t truly needed.

“Things were really good for a new graduate; I was working with four other colleagues. I could bounce things off them and share emergency duty. But there was always that unrest,” he said. “I realized that it would be hard to move unless someone called and said, ‘We need you.’

“Then within a couple weeks, a friend called and said, ‘Hey, I want to start a practice in Thief River Falls, Minn. Would you be interested (in helping me)?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I’m ready to go!’”

Meyer soon left to begin the new practice with his friend. After about three years, though, Meyer decided he still wasn’t doing what he felt led to do during college. So he and his wife decided to travel with Christian Veterinary Mission, (which places veterinarians all over the world) and see what it took to be a vet in another country. After two weeks in Bolivia, however, he and his wife chose to return to America.

“At that point in time, we had five children and decided we couldn’t take them to Bolivia and live there, so we ruled out foreign missions,” Meyer said.

Not long after returning home, Meyer received a phone call explaining that a veterinary practice in Ashland, Wis., was being sold. The veterinarian there had suddenly died and the family was trying to sell the business quickly.

Meyer remembers, “At the time it came up for sale in May 1988, there were no other practices in Ashland, so when I heard about it I thought, ‘Wow, here’s a big town with 9,000 people and no vet now.’

We came here and looked and I saw there were farms (in the area) and a major need for a large-animal veterinarian. And I thought, ‘Yes, this is the place.’”

Meyer is licensed as a veterinarian in Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin. And since taking over Willow Animal Hospital, Meyer has added two other veterinarians to help him with the small-animal care — Dr. Sammi Bletsch and Dr. Colleen Walmsley.

Being the only large-animal vet in his business, Meyer hopes to add another large-animal veterinarian in the future.

With no shortage of client households (The practice has an estimated 4,000 clients with varied numbers of pets per household.), the vets at Willow Animal Hospital rarely are idle. Beside traditional pets like cats and dogs, Meyer also has cared for fish, snakes, iguanas, turtles and chickens.

Some pets keep vets very busy. Swallowing items like fishhooks, underwear and socks, getting rubber balls stuck in throats and round steak bones trapped around lower jaws, some pets baffle veterinarians with their appetites and injuries.

Tom and Karen Franczyk of Wentworth, Wis., have been loyal clients of Willow Animal Hospital for many years.

“Recently my family took our dear golden retriever for her last trip to Willow Animal Hospital,” Karen Franczyk said. “Everyone there was so supportive and compassionate. They gave me a Kleenex box and many hugs as we went through the farewell process. Everything was done respectfully and with tender care. Although this veterinary practice is 50 miles from our home, we have been loyal clients for many years.

It feels like family there.”

Remember that horse who wasn’t healing up after almost a month on antibiotics? Meyer decided to probe the wound and see if there was something keeping it from scabbing over.

“I went up in there and pulled out a piece of wood that was about a foot long — about as big around as my wrist! And that horse was still running around. (The stick) had gotten up in there and broken off,”

Meyer said.

The wound healed up well and the horse seemed none the worse for wear.

Reminiscing about a special Bible verse, Meyer said, “A client shared a verse with me a number of years ago, Proverbs 12:10, which says, ‘A righteous man has regard for the life of his animal, but even the compassion of the wicked is cruel.’ I often think of the verse and how we should take care of our animals.”

Willow Animal Hospital’s purpose statement explains that: “Our primary goal and reason for existence is service. We are problem solvers, here to help clients maintain healthy animals or to diagnose and treat disease. In the course of our work, we seek also to encourage people’s spiritual growth, to increase their knowledge of Scripture and direct people to the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Meyer became a believer in Jesus Christ in 1982. He helped start Grace Bible Fellowship, of Washburn, Wis., in 1990 and presently attends the church.

Beside the veterinary care he gives on a daily basis, Meyer also teaches a seven-week course about one of his hobbies at Northland College each year. Dog Sledding 101 gives students from the college the opportunity to come out to the animal hospital to learn hands-on dogsledding with Meyer’s 20 Siberian Huskies. He also trains the students about skijoring, which is cross-country skiing while being pulled by a dog in harness. He teaches the students about building and the upkeep of the dogsleds, harnesses and other equipment.

Some of Meyer’s most interesting days as a veterinarian are when “there’s cattle you can’t catch and you’ve got to work on them for whatever reason. So I have a blowpipe; I go hunting actually! I get my blowpipe loaded with tranquilizer and go out in the pasture to catch a cow and I shoot it and rope it. That’s always fun.”