In 1910 the El Dorado Animal Clinic opened its doors in El Dorado.
Over the past 100 years, the clinic has seen many changes, from types of animals seen to technology advances.
History of the Center
Dr. Amos Gish, who graduated from Kansas City Veterinary College, opened the Animal Clinic right after he graduated from college. In the late teens, his son John was born. Veterinary medicine stayed in the family with John going to veterinary school.
“He was in school when penicillin was discovered,” said Dr. Davy Harkins, who is the veterinarian at the clinic today, “so much of his schooling was what some people now are calling alternative medicine in that they learned how to use herbs and pharmaceuticals instead of antibiotics.
“It was extremely interesting to watch Dr. John when modern medicine wasn’t working on what he fell back to and how he would change a case. The new alternative medicine is basically a return to a lot of the old.”
Harkins still has John’s recipe box for various treatments.
Harkins joined the clinic in 1971, a week after he graduated from veterinary school.
His starting salary was $10,500.
“I was very fortunate in that my salary was low enough that I had time to grow and observe what Dr. Gish had to teach me and as such I think I’m a better doctor for it,” he said.
But Harkins didn’t plan on staying.
“I was going to stay three years and then go back to school and get a master’s,” he recalled. “That didn’t work out.”
Instead, he has remained at the clinic ever since.
“At that time, the practice was primarily a large animal practice,” he said. “We did have a small animal doctor, but the large animal doctors took care of the small animals also.”
That has changed.
“Over the years the practice has evolved to where more than half of it is small animal now,” Harkins said. “In fact, a large percentage is small animal. I was part of the shift where the large animal portion of it remained governed by the economics of the animal and the small animal portion became driven by the emotional bond between the owner and the animal.
“Basically, we have changed as the demands for veterinary medicine has changed.”
Changes over the years
Harkins has seen a lot of changes over the years.
“When I came to practice we still had a lot of the original family homesteaders on farms and they gave us a very unique perspective on how the country has come together,” Harkins recalled.
He explained those people showed the original human-animal bond in that they always cared for their animals before taking care of themselves.
“Some of my favorites were older people who finally retired from a farm and moved to town,” Harkins said. “Many times they would leave Ol’ Shep out on the farm for the new owner of the farm and they would get lonesome for animals and get a smaller dog, which they would keep as a house dog.
“When they came in they would extol on how smart this new dog was and many of those I told Ol’ Shep was just as smart as those others, you just didn’t give him a chance to show it.’”
Over the years, the clinic’s role with the ranchers also has changed.
Harkins said it used to be more interactive, with him often pregnancy checking more than 20,000 cattle a year in the 1970s, which included going to a lot of dairies, and now he doesn’t pregnancy check more than 5,000 a year.
“Dairy practice was a love-hate relationship in that I very much love working on dairy cows and much of it was hands on,” he explained.
“But by the same token, they stretched the day out to very early morning and very late night.”
Now the cattle portion of the practice is moving fairly solidly to stock feeder or cow-calf.
Another change was that when Harkins first started a portion of his salary was subsidized by product sales to farmers and now they get those products from medicine wagons or online.
Technology also has changed immensely, including blood chemistry technology, which was not available when Harkins graduated from school. In addition x-rays were basic and there was no such thing as ultrasound or laser surgery.
“Basically, we relied way more on the physical exam and then basically treating the diseases that fell into the physical exam that we could treat,” Harkins said.
He gave the example of an animal that had either pneumonia or lung cancer. They couldn’t treat the lung cancer, but they could treat the pneumonia.
Cancer treatment is one of the things that has changed as well, going from a fatalistic diagnosis to a lot of therapies to cure or medicate the effects of the cancer.
“Back in the ’70s when we got a problem internally with a dog, the common practice was to anesthetize, open up and look with exploratory surgery,” he said. “We don’t use that as much now as we used to and we do way more diagnostics beforehand.”
He said technology has made the job easier and harder at the same time.
“Many times we can figure out exactly what’s the matter with an individual,” Harkins said. “But many times when we figure out what’s the matter with them, we still can’t do much about it and sometimes when we finally figure it out, the owner can’t afford it.”
Another change in animal care is a push for health insurance for pets.
“But with the mess human health insurance has now, I don’t know that pet insurance is the way to go,” he said, explaining that pet insurance companies start having exclusions that continue to raise the price.
“The people who can afford the health insurance can probably afford most of the treatments,” he continued.
Unique experiences
“I am amazed at the similarities and differences between species and something we see rarely in one species, but we may see commonly in another,” he said.
Harkins has had a lot of opportunity to see those differences with the variety of animals he has treated.
“I have very seldom turned down the opportunity to interact with a new type of animal,” he said.
In the late 1980s into the 1990s big cats became popular, which changed his business some.
“Bob cats were popular back in the ’70s, then they kind of gravitated to mountain lions, tigers and lions,” he said. “They were a very interesting individual to work with. You don’t force anything.”
He said one of the most interesting big cats he had the opportunity to meet was a snow leopard. He had to remove a kidney stone from the animal’s ureter.
They also have treated a lot of different birds at the clinic.
“The eagles are probably the most notable,” Harkins said. “We do a lot of hawks and owls also.”
Of all of the birds, Harkins thinks the most majestic bird is a Golden Eagle.
Another unusual case involved a camel.
“A November several years ago an individual called up and wanted a camel castrated,” Harkins said. “I said, ‘maybe you should contact the Sedgwick County Zoo’ and they said ‘we have; that’s who told us to call you.’
“So for Christmas that year I castrated a camel. It’s applying general techniques and moving with the individual variations.”
Harkins also has worked on several buffalo, which were popular several years ago.
“A buffalo stampede is not a figment of the imagination,” he said, “because it is difficult to get a single buffalo to move. We’ve had as many as three of them stacked up on top of each other in the cattle chute out back.”
Another interesting animal Harkins has cared for was a timberwolf, on which he was performing surgery.
He recalled one room where there was a surgery table in the middle and they had the timberwolf up on the table.
“At that time we did not have gas anesthesia,” he said. “She took a step and pulled the needle out of the vein. I went to take a hold of her leg to put it back down. She reached down, smelled her leg with the blood starting to trickle down, and she became a timberwolf right there on the table.
“The hair stood up on her back, her eyes became glazed and we backed up against the wall,” he continued. “She got off the table by herself and started pacing the room. Every circle she would make somebody would slip out the door. For those of us on that side of the room (away from the door) we were kind of trapped. We got it done, but we had a timberwolf pacing the surgery room with a full morning of surgery.”
Programs through the Clinic
The Animal Clinic has been and is involved in a variety of events or programs over the years.
One is Spay Day, where they spay or neuter cats and dogs at a reduced cost one day out of the year. They are always booked on this day and even have a waiting list.
“Spay Day is an interesting thing in that we do between 30 and 50 animal sterilization procedures on a single day,” Harkins said. “The unique thing that we do is we do not cut corners between what they get and what the clientele get. Animals are taken care of from the time we start until they are awake back in the cage.”
They are joined by veterinary technician students from Colby Community College for this event.
Harkins also was one of the original charter members in the Wildlife Rehabilitation Facility that was located at the El Dorado Correctional Facility North Unit, until it closed in 2008. He continues to do a lot of work with wildlife, including orphaned animals.
“A lot of animals are disrupted by human activity,” he said. “It is our duty to mitigate the effects of that.”
One example is two barn swallows Harkins got as fluffy pre-fledglings.
“Now they are flying around the house,” he said. “We are in the process of trying to figure out how to turn them loose so they can be self sufficient.”
He also has been involved in 4-H for many years.
“Basically I started getting active in the mid-70s, then I became more so as my kids got into 4-H,” he said.
Now Harkins serves as the Fair vet and works on 4-Hers’ animals as needed.
Changes in the clinic
Over the years, the clinic building also has expanded.
The original business was upstairs over an auto supply store a block north of where it is now on East Locust.
“There is still some of the old veterinary stuff up there in the loft,” he said.
The current clinic was built in 1960 by Dr. John.
Since then, the former pound facility was added in 1977 and the cattle working facilities were added. In 1999 to 2000, the clinic proper received a major expansion.
“The clinic, in my vision, would be a central hospital with several veterinarians sharing technology,” Harkins said.
This is one thing that has disappointed him.
He would like to see the veterinarians work together to share technology and expertise, not each have to support their own facility, which can also limit equipment that each has.
When he expanded the clinic it was designed to be a four-doctor practice.
Other additions include a grooming facility that is separate from the rest of the clinic, yet still accessible to the clinic if needed.
They also added the surgery and radiology rooms and an area for dental work, something Harkins started really studying in the late 1980s. He is one of the few doctors in Kansas with the knowledge and expertise to perform such procedures as root canals and braces on animals. Other changes include a new pharmacy and lab and more blood chemistry machines, allowing them to do most of their blood chemistry in house.
There also is a recovery and intensive care unit with insulated walls to reduce noise and a grooming area for bathing patients.
Looking to the future
When looking to the future, Harkins has concerns about food animal practice in the area.
“I am at the age when I should be training a new doctor to take my place,” Harkins said.
But don’t take that to mean that he is planning to retire anytime soon.
“I have had the unique opportunity to change my area of expertise at least five times over my career as a veterinarian without ever having to change my location,” he said. “I look forward to the changes and challenges that still await me.”
