Hello, it's Anthony Chadwick from the webinarett welcoming you to another of our vet chat episodes. And I am in a sleepy town in, Devon, hence the, rather garish wallpaper behind me. Your red is much more suitable, Brent, as a Liverpool fan, I applaud your colour.

The, the soccer, as we would say in, in the UK we've just been, We've just been named as champions of the Premier League, but as I say, I'm down in in Devon, sadly at one of my old professor's funerals, Professor Don Kelly, who I'd like to dedicate this episode to, great teacher and a great encourager actually, down the years, I would quite regularly get emails from him just. Telling me the work that I was doing was good and so on, so a, a, a huge encourager and of course you go to a funeral and there's always a little bit of a sadness there because you realise that this person who was maybe your lecturer or maybe even a, you know, a father or whatever, there was all this other life that you never quite knew about and you can see what a fabulous person they were. So, but I just wanted to sort of dedicate this episode.

Particularly those who were perhaps at Bristol or Liverpool will remember Professor Don Kelly with fondness, so, . Yeah, but it, having said all of that, Brent, it's great to have you on the podcast as well. So Brent Mayha is the Chief Medical Officer for Royal Cannon.

We will share how we kind of met cos it's quite an interesting story around podcasting, but before we do that, I'd love you just to maybe introduce yourself to the, to the audience. Well, first, and they thank you for having me on. I listen to this podcast all the time, so it's kind of cool for me to be on it with you.

Yeah, so I'm, I'm Brett May, as you said, I'm the chief medical officer for Royal Canon globally. And I'm a veterinarian. I finished vet school many, many years ago and went directly into small animal practise, general small animal practise, cats and dogs.

And my story is a little bit unique in that I knew in vet school that I really the practise wasn't the right fit for me long term. And so, we had this really cool class that was called like alternative careers in Veterinary Medicine in school and it introduced us to veterinarians who were doing things besides practise. And when I met the industry vets, this seemed like a really interesting path.

And so I talked to them and I said, how do I get a job in industry? And they said, you got to practise first, you got to be the customer to understand the customer. And so I said, OK, how long do I need to do that?

And they said 3 to 5 years. And so at 3 years, I started applying to industry jobs and in 5 years I got my first industry job, which was Royal Canon, and I've been there ever since. I've held different types of roles, you know, if we want to get into the details later, we can, but all leading sort of up to I started on the phones, answering calls from veterinarians about diets and then, you know, to where we are today 21 years later.

Wow, fascinating and, you know, for me, I, I probably had a similar. Kind of story in that I was, I stayed in practise, having said that, but I was fascinated around nutrition, so very early doors and in that time in the 90s, I qualified in 1990. Hill's science plan was coming into the market, and Hills actually were great at educating people in the diet, but also doing management stuff as well.

But I went through, I think sometimes people thought this was more of a nursing qualification. But I did all the veterinary qualifications, and in fact, when I was a student, I used to go to a practise in Accrington. And there was a dog food made by Leo Pharmaceuticals.

It was, they had like an obesity diet. And they would see that the reps would come into this particular practise and say, we see sort of at Easter in the summer time, your sales of obesity diets rocket, and basically they'd let me carry on, you know, the vets who knew that I was, you know, interested in, in all things nutritional, but particularly around obesity. They'd let me carry on the consult for these fat Labradors that waddled in, you know, with arthritis.

And, and my kind of talk, or the way I started my talk was, if I can only give you one drug, you know, a, a painkiller or a food, if you like, then I would choose a food every time because if you can get 10% off this dog. This dog will walk a lot better, and once you get it walking better, you'll get the weight off it as well, and obviously if we can, we'll give it painkillers because it probably needs those as well. But actually that weight reduction is, is so, so important.

So nutrition though, in some way, are we getting better at that as vets at. I actually seeing nutrition as part of the solution, particularly with obviously the prescription diets when things have gone wrong, or do you think we as vets still need to do more and know more? Well, I mean, I think there's always more on any particular topic that we could probably get to, but I think we've improved a lot in two ways.

One, sort of as, as you said. Intervention with nutrition in situations where there is an issue. I think there's been a lot of advancements over the years of things that we now know that nutrition can impact.

I think the other side that maybe is almost as exciting, probably not quite as far along though is I've seen some change in terms of thinking about nutrition's role in preventing. You know, issues or at least keeping the, the dog and the cat as healthy as they can be so that other things don't come in like and obesity is a great example of that is it's certainly easier to keep the weight off than it is to take the weight off. But, but I mean, yes, I, overall, I, I've seen a lot of change, a lot of the discussions that when I started, you know, on the phones many, many years ago.

It was like, you know, you could, you could count like urinary is gonna be a question, renal is gonna be a question, and derm's gonna be a question. And weirdly to say, at that time, GI was sometimes a question, but a lot of people just, you know, sort of boiled hamburger or chicken and rice. And this is completely changed.

Now, all of those are covered, but now we're talking about it with relationship to Mobility, we're talking about it, you know, with relationship to liver and the consistency of use with GI issues is way, way higher than it used to be. So, you know, it's been really nice to see and ultimately, the, the benefactors or the beneficiaries, I should say of all this are the cats and the dogs. Yeah, and of course, 20 years is a long time.

I can't really call you a young vet anymore, can I, Brent? No, you cannot. We're young and you'll be hopefully.

Yes indeed. I, I loved, you know, we've known each other now for probably over a year, and I would class you as one of my friends over I'm not being too British forward by saying that. But it, it was great the way we met because there was a bit of serendipity about it.

You'd obviously, I think, seen a podcast that I'd done with Dave Nicol, who I know is known very well in America, also in the UK, but he's a bit of a, I, I think he's a bit of a superstar on the American. And talk circus, isn't he, because he keeps on winning the VMX Speaker awards and things. And quite by chance, we were both in Austin at the same time at Amma and we were able to meet up, so it's, it's fascinating the way that the world has shrunk with the benefit of the internet and everything, isn't it?

Cos those sort of meetings, you know, possibly wouldn't have happened 20 years ago. Yeah, or it would have been really rare if they, if they did. And, and yeah, I mean this was just like I I I knew that we had briefly connected related to something with the work that you were doing with Royal Can I think in the UK many, many years ago.

So we were connected on LinkedIn technically, and, and I was so inspired by some of the things that you said in that podcast. And I don't normally do this, but I just felt compelled to reach out through LinkedIn and just to say hello and, you know, that that I was inspired. And so yeah, and then, and then here we are, you know, AVMA was in Austin, as you said, we got to connect a person and here we are this time later, you know, talking on a podcast of all things.

No, it's fascinating and, and I think LinkedIn is, is great because of course then we we we share stories through, through LinkedIn, you know, I. I love particularly talking around the sustainability piece, which is, you know, my passion, but obviously last week I saw that you had a lot of the chief medical officers together or a couple of weeks ago in, in Dublin. So tell us about that, you know, what you obviously are the person who set that meeting up, what is the purpose of that meeting for you as Chief Medical Officer of, Of Royal Canon to bring everybody together as chief medical officers in the various groups that exist in the UK and America and and Australia and further afield.

The story with that meeting starts quite a few years ago, back in 2018, and what was happening is I was, I, I was in a slightly different version of the role I'm in now I was in the US version, you know, at, at the time of this role. And we, we were working with a lot of different corporate groups, and we started to see with some of them, now some of them had a chief medical officer or a chief veterinary officer for a very long time, but some of them, the younger groups. They were starting to put veterinarians on their leadership teams and for different responsibilities.

And as we would work with the different groups, we would see that, you know, medical group A would have the responsibilities of, you know, some things for their chief medical officer, be different, see different, and so forth. And as we would talk to these guys, it was sort of They were really early on in these roles as far as developing what they were and they were always like, you know, what do you guys think? And, and so we saw this opportunity to do a couple of things.

One was as this role in general to our profession was somewhat new. We thought there might be an opportunity to bring these guys together, cause it's kind of a lonely role with in any given organisation, you're kind of it in that role, regardless of what your responsibilities are, you know, you're you're sort of by yourself, and there was no really way to connect, unless you just happen to know other people who had this job in other companies. So we thought, well, there might be an opportunity to bring them together to sort of discuss that.

And then we thought also, like, when you think about that in the sense of If you can congregate all of these medical leaders, you know, the highest medical leadership of any of these companies together, what can we do for the profession? And so that's, that's how it started is, is we thought there might be some benefit to them as individuals but also to the profession. But the, the important thing and as we well know now with like the environment that we're in is we have to do this in a way that is non-competitive, where we're not gonna be talking about business, we're going to be talking about the profession and and topics that are professional level and above and, and so that was, we thought, well, we'll try it once and if it doesn't work then you know, we tried.

And my gosh, they were so like and and we even said this in our meeting last week in Dublin because we're starting to see new people rotate in some of these roles for companies. The phrase that keeps coming up is, oh my gosh, me too. I thought I was the only one, you know, who was thinking.

And, and a great topic that, that, you know, it's always a topic at our meetings like this are around well-being of veterinarians and, you know, how do we, how do we work on this not just as individual companies, which is good, but also as a profession. And so we, we started at the feedback on the first one was so good. We decided to continue it and we have, you know, more or lessons then we took a few years off during the pandemic, we couldn't congregate people, but What we do is we go to them and we say, what do you guys, what do you guys want to learn about?

And so our role in this role Keenan, why, why do we do this? Is is to provide that neutral forum to arrange the logistics and all of that so that we can get these great minds together talking about problems of the industry and the profession that they can work on solving together and we do a lot of work to foster that neutrality. And honestly, I always tell our external speakers when they're coming in.

You guys aren't gonna believe this, but technically everybody in this room is a competitor, but they don't act like it. They're so collegial because they've all got the profession in mind and, and those sorts of topics that, that will help the profession. So that was where it started with us just wanting to kind of convene these great minds together and see what they could do and it's worked, so we've continued to do it, since then and our last one was, was in Dublin a few weeks ago.

Yeah, and I think it's, it's, it's really important. My, my kind of recollection of profession over the last 35 years, and actually when you hear people coming in from the outside, you know, non-vets, but working within the industry, who maybe have worked in the medical industry, we commonly get this kind of comment that, The veterinary profession is a friendly profession, even when competitors are coming together, you know, that people actually can rise above that and that that's massive, and I suppose kind of in parallel, you know, we at Webinar we're forming something similar with the Veterinary green discussion forum of bringing people together, you know, who obviously are competitors, but actually we can solve these huge problems like. The environmental crisis, better if we work together than if we're all trying to solve it on our own.

Exactly the same concept, that's exactly, you know, what that was our approach from the from the beginning with us. And I presume also, you know, as vets we're trained to be vets and, you know, we're very good at that, etc. But then we have to sort of learn all these skills that nobody taught us about at university, like running our own practises.

But then now for Chief Medical officers, it's very much around leadership, so presumably you talk a lot around leadership to actually help they themselves develop during these meetings as well. We do. There's sometimes there's an overt topic on leadership as there was this time.

Other times it's more around we will, we will pick a focus on a topic and sustainability was a topic this time too. And so leadership will always come to the forefront because of their roles and honestly these people have been sort of trained to be leaders and I think that shifts their internal lens on almost any topic we talk about. They're, they're coming at it, but, but interestingly this time at the meeting, we brought in, I'll I'll give a plug for an organisation here in the US it's called Battlefield Leadership and it's a group of former military folks who are also historians, most of them have PhDs in history.

And they teach leadership skills based on the historical facts of, of a certain battle or in this case it wasn't a battle we talked about NASA and how NASA brought in led in bringing innovations in the space race, but they use those, those historical facts to kind of teach leadership lessons and that that's what we did for this group is innovation is such a hot topic in the, in the profession right now. And we talked to them about how, how can you guys lead innovation within your organisations using NASA as an example. Obviously for those people who don't know, I mean, Royal Cannon obviously this massive feed company Dog and Cats, founded by a French veterinarian in France and, and then.

A number of years ago, obviously bought by the Mars family, who, as I get to know more and more about Mars, the more and more I, I kind of fall in love with the stuff that they're doing, you know, very much sustainability within a generation. They can make those long term views and look at things in a, in a bigger way, and I know education is very much a part of that as well, and also. You know, the principles around quality, around mutuality, freedom, efficiency, responsibility, that kind of also creates, I think, talented people who were obviously already talented, but, you know, learn and become better through the training.

And one of the things I've noticed, having been to America a few years on the run now at VMX is how many of the chief medical officers in some of the corporate groups have come from the VCAs and the band fields and so on. So you can see that that is very much embedded in the, in the Mars mentality, it is to develop leadership and develop leaders, isn't it? Very much so.

And you know, interestingly, just today I was in a meeting and the meeting was about the purpose of Mars and actually a Mars family member was attending that that meeting to talk about that. And this is one of the things that we talked about is how core this is to to Mars. It's important to the family, it's important to the board, is that there is a purpose behind this and and we do try to make much longer term decisions, and one of those, you know, things is around people and and and.

And really lifting up people, empowering them, and providing them the, the tools that they need to develop, leadership being a great example of that. And, and yes, we, we looked a few years ago, it's been a while now since we did it and we looked at the current kind of group of chief medical officers and I forget the number, but it's a pretty high percentage. Of them had some Mars experience at some point.

So yeah, not just the Mars hospitals themselves. Tell me a little bit about how have you been educated into the role. So what are the sort of things that you've done over those 20 years and, and how has that developed you?

Also to then, obviously, you know, the best way to learn is to go to a course, take that learning and then teach somebody else as well, so I know you're very much. Your chief medical officer role very much as a mentoring and teaching aspect to it, kind of explain to us how that works, and maybe as also part of how you develop through the organisation from, you know, answering the, well, not answering the phone, but, you know, talking to vets about problems, to now being Chief Medical Officer, cos it's a really, it, it sounds like a really interesting journey. I'll just be very transparent with you in the audience.

I came into this role very naive or came into working for Roy came in very naive in in that I didn't really understand, you know, a a large company. From my perspective, I was a practising veterinarian and I was an associate vet, and so there was one possible promotion in that pathway at the time, and that was by the clinic or become an owner. And so when I came to Royal Cannon, I didn't really think about it as a, a career path.

I just thought I'm getting a new job that I hopefully, you know, will enjoy, etc. Etc. And so after about a year of doing the calls, I remember the head of the US vet business at the time came to me and he said, Would you like to be a a manager of of the team that you're on?

And I, I literally as as a veterinarian, I thought that he's got a problem that he needs help with. So I said to him, sure, if you want me to. I didn't realise he was sort of feeling me out for investing in me.

And, and, and so anyway, I got, I got lucky and, and they, they started talking to me about leadership and then I had the chance to get my first position as as a manager and, and it was the team that I was on, so kind of the natural progression. But I'll, I'll tell you, Anthony, where I've learned the most. Is the roles that have pulled me out of my comfort zone of being a veterinarian.

All of my veterinary roles I've I've enjoyed. But it's those roles where being a veterinarian has helped but is not really the qualification for the role that I've learned the most and so after, after my time in technical service, you know, helping vets, helping educate vets about our products roles, I moved into a job in what we call corporate affairs that some companies call that some companies call it other stuff, but basically. It's external relations.

Now some of that external relations work was with veterinarians or with veterinary organisations. So that, that felt like a natural progression, but some of it wasn't, some of it was government affairs and actually I was responsible for leading PR for the entire US business, not veterinary PR but total company PR, and those were, were learnings and I remember when I got that role, it was, it was a role on the Roy Kean US leadership team. And my boss at the time, the president of the company, I, I, again, I kind of had this mindset of he's, he wants me here to be the veterinary voice on the leadership team.

He, he did, but that wasn't all. And, and I remember once not there was a conversation going on about supply chain stuff and I remember just sort of like, just sort of not doing much to it. And after the meeting, he said, I really want you to participate in these conversations and I said, well, I don't know anything about supply chain, he said, doesn't matter and it and it the light bulb came on as it were to say.

I have, yes, I, I'm a veterinarian and I'll bring that, but not only, like, he wants me to be part of the leadership team and so, you know, I, I started really studying up other other functions and and other parts of the organisation and, and so again this is where I feel like I've had the most learning and Sort of extracting this out now and talking to other vets out there, I would say I've had, you know, the best experience when I've taken a chance on a role or maybe even not a full role but an assignment that is really outside of my comfort zone. And yes, maybe being a veterinarian informs how I do the job, but it isn't necessarily a job for a veterinarian. Don't be scared to take a risk and try some of those.

If you don't like it, you can always go back to the veterinary spot. I mean, there there'll always be work there for that. Challenge yourself a little bit and and give it a try.

You never know, you know, where it'll take you or what you'll learn from it. Yeah, I mean, we are certainly in the UK, you know, telling me that it's different in America. We're a conservative profession.

I think we've got better in the, in the, that sense of taking risks, looking outside, you know, as a vet. You know, going to learn about PR or learn about supply chain, you know, it's not within our natural comfort zone, but you're right, by doing that, you can bring in so many skills because as a vet training, you are, they're looking to solve solve problems as well. So if they're seeing a problem within the supply chain.

Having somebody like a vet who's looking at it maybe slightly differently than the, the average supply chain person will look at it. Sometimes looking at it from a slightly different angle will help to solve the problem. So, I mean, how did you learn about supply chain and PR?

Was that you went away and read books, you know, as I do when I'm trying to, as I've tried to get better at sustainability, I've tried to, To read up, I've obviously done the circular economy course with, with Cambridge, or where, you know, Royal Cannon's sending you on particular courses to do those, to become better in those areas. I, I, there was some of, of each of those. I, I would, you know, kind of approach things like a veterinarian would approach things with, you know, let me go and, and study up on it and, and so there would be some, you know, kind of independent learning with books or or online courses and and walking into Mars in general is very supportive of that and and they, they, they help you out with that.

But where I, I think I've learned the most is when I've gone to other people and said, you know, will you help me in this and thinking about like a topic like supply chain or PR, you know, these, these are people from a vastly different background and, you know, coming to them and saying, you know, will you help me? They're almost always willing to to do it. I mean, in fact, I think they It's nice because they, they, you're interested in their stuff and so they're, they're always very willing to help you.

And you know, I think as I've talked to vets, you know, either through vets I'm formally mentoring or just vets in and out of our company who I get the chance to talk to about leadership development and and growing your career. This is, this is one of the things that I say is, you know, you, you can learn these other things because what vet school taught you. Is how to solve problems.

I mean, we don't think about it like that because it was in the context of medicine and so we think about it as medicine, but really what we were taught was how to solve a problem and I remember once I was working on something unrelated to veterinary medicine. It was a business problem, and I was kind of, I was kind of using soap methodology and so I was writing it down like that and, and working with some people on the business side and they were like, what did you learn to do that? I was like, That's cool, you know, and, and, and so again, I think it's the way that we think through problems can be, can be part in so many other situations besides our particular area of expertise.

I think you made a great point there, you know, actually going and learning from somebody who's doing the job, and then you actually do the job. And actually, you probably will make some mistakes, but actually, having gone to the person who's an expert on it, you know, the definition of an intelligent person is they learn from their own mistakes, a genius learns from other people, so the more you can kind of involve the kind of senior person, cos they will have those years of wisdom to teach, but it's a bit like. For those of you who are listening to this as a podcast rather than a podcast, you can see it as a podcast on the webinar that channel.

Brent has some beautiful musical instruments behind him, a guitar, a drum. And of course, the only way you really get better on guitar isn't by studying the academic side of, you know, all where all the notes are. You've actually just got to get in there and do, and I think somebody once said to do, sorry, to know and not to do is not to know.

So actually the doing is hugely significant, isn't it? It's honestly it's where I've I've learned the most. I've, I think it's important that you do the other prep.

I mean that that helps you get there, but until you're in there doing it, that's, you know, that's really where the experience comes from and having people around you that will help you. They will let you make mistakes, but they, but they'll help you kind of pick up from those mistakes because that's, that's where a lot of the, the learning occurs and, and don't misunderstand me, like I don't have this all figured out. Like that's just, that's been my path is sort of stepping out of my comfort zone, usually making a lot of mistakes.

My first job as a manager, I made a lot of first time manager mistakes, but even as I moved to those other areas, I made a lot of mistakes. But I, I learned from him and I learned that mostly, mostly, mistakes aren't fatal, you just gotta, you know, get what you get from them and move on. And sometimes apologise.

Yes, always helps to do that, yes. You're obviously a very empathetic individual, which I think helps, isn't it? If you treat people well, be they clients, colleagues, you know, employees, people that you manage, if they can see that there's a basic fairness and, and that you probably encourage more than you hit with a stick, then I, I was actually, you know, at the funeral I was at er before, and I ended up speaking to somebody who'd been in the military.

And it was the same thing of, you know, the first thing he said the first thing he did when he became an officer was he said, I need to give orders out, and you know, he didn't have much success with that, so there had to be a way of, if people like you. They will work better for you than if they, you know, maybe res respect or maybe even worse, don't really like at all, but kind of it's a job and they've they've got to stay there, they're they're not gonna put their best efforts in, are they? Right, right.

I, I've, I've learned this a lot of different ways throughout my career, this exact thing. And an example I would give of most recently is in my current role, I kind of have two, I think functional areas is the way I look at it. One is sort of to be the medical leader who is the connection between Royal Can and other organisations medical leadership, be it corporate hospitals, be it vending organisations or other animal organisations.

So that's kind of one role, but my other role is around, I have a team and and this team is charged with developing the educational content for Royal Canon. It's also charged with the relationships with specialty groups within veterinary medicine. And one of the things about this particular team is it's a team of international people who come from very different parts of the world and very different cultures and This has been such a blessing to me to get to work with people from such diverse cultures, because the way they approach problems is not necessarily the way I would approach a problem.

And, and I mean there's a lot of funny examples. There's a really good book called The Culture Map, which helped me a lot, you know, as I was, as I was sort of getting my feet under me. But you know, there's, there's a lot of cultures who, you know, approach a problem just in a very different direction and I've learned a lot from the people I work with in that respect is, you know, turn this problem upside down a bit and go at it from that direction.

And so this has been, this has been something really great with my role, but it is, you know, it is, is to say, you got to listen, you got to hear people, and, and you can learn from people all around you in different levels of the organisation. It's interesting, you know, talking about education, and I, I think we did a little search on our database, on our community, and to see how many Royal Canon email addresses we had, and we had about 2660. So you've got an enormous number of vets and nurses who work within the company, and, you know, I see a lot of scientific communication officers from dotted all over the world, you know, on LinkedIn and so on.

So there is that huge role, isn't it, you know, you are an educator. Of vets of nurses, vet techs, also pet owners as well, but how does that educational role fit in for you as an individual? So obviously, yeah, I understand educating externally, and we'll perhaps talk about that because I know you're, as a sort of interest almost aside from Royal Cannon is very much around personal finance, isn't it?

Mhm. Which we can talk about, but do you see yourself as a teacher and a mentor to that, you know, huge group of vets and nurses that you have working in the business and how do you do that? Because when you've got such a big number, how are you able to approach that?

I, I definitely see that is, is maybe the most important part of my role is to help, help the other vets in the business do what they need to do to, to be good at their at their roles. So we have, you know, we have kind of structurally speaking, we have, as most organisations, we have some internal ways to do this. We have platforms, we have a learning management system, that sort of thing.

But a lot of it is, is again sort of not as as we would often say in all the averaging. And not sort of saying, OK, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do like a a blanket presentation on this topic for everyone who wants to attend. It's more saying, let's approach the people, you know, in Western Europe and what, what are some of the, the areas that we, we see for the business that these, these veterinarians want to develop into, what are those topics?

And then if, if it happens to be a topic that I might be the right fit for is, OK, then let's, let's do this. And so it goes back to what we mentioned earlier. Within within Mars and Ro Kon there's a lot of time spent on, on developing people and I think the way to do that effectively takes a lot more time to do it this way, but is to really sort of break it down and, and kind of go where people are.

So what we do for Europe and what we would do, you know, how I might be involved in something for Asia Pacific is gonna be different because those two needs are, are very different, different parts of the world we have. Probably maybe vets who are a little bit earlier on in their career. So what we wanna do with those, those vets is a lot different than in an area where like the US where it's the vets are a little bit further along in their career path and I might talk to them about but it it I mean it could be nutrition, those sorts of things is, is, you know, would make sense, but it's also a lot of leadership topics as well.

I love that word, that's a new word for me. The averaging. That's a great word.

Yeah, no, that's, that's truly fascinating as well. One of the things we do is we do an annual survey and one of the things we ask is what would you like us to do next year at Webinarett? And I think in some ways.

You know, the ideal business asks their prospective clients what they want, and then gives it to them, and it's the same with employees, isn't it? You know, where do you think you need to be developed, and then in some ways that people know themselves better than we know themselves. So it's really worth listening to, isn't it?

It it it really is, and I think in a way veterinarians are sort of natural teachers. I mean, I mean when you're in the room in front of a client, you know, a 1% of what you're doing is, is, is educating. Whether you're necessarily thinking about like that or not, in order to be successful, you have to do that.

And, and so I think it fits, it fits right in and I think the flip side is as veterinarians, we are naturally learners, so we love to be educated on different topics too, so yeah. We could talk for ages, we probably need to do another podcast, Brent. I mean, the personal finance thing, I think we should speak briefly about, but it's a really important topic, isn't it, because.

We can be the best vets we can be, but actually looking after our own finance, but also looking after the practise finance, it's an area that we're just not taught about at vet school, or certainly when I went, I know certain schools like Nottingham in the UK are much better at teaching business than, you know, some of the more traditional older colleges, and I presume you've got similar examples in America as well. But tell us a little bit, how does that work, how do you do that, what do you bring to the table for, you know, the young vet or young nurse at tech starting their career? Thanks for the opportunity to talk about this.

I've always had an interest in personal finance that started early in my practise career, and it started simply coming back to our theme with another veterinarian in the practise I worked in educating me about it. He asked me one day, Has anyone ever talked to you about saving for retirement in the US? The impetus for retirement saving is usually on the individual, and no one had talked to me about it.

I had no idea what he was talking about. It didn't come for money. I didn't come from a family who knew how to manage money.

And as you said, no one taught me in vet school. So he had a talk with him one night and he, and he didn't realise, but he sparked a fire. And so I've always done it on the, on sort of my own sort of personal time.

But a few years ago, as we started to really look at well-being and what these factors that are impacting well-being with veterinarians. One of them is their finances and so, You know, we kind of moved these conversations about finance from not talking about it, you know, for myriad reasons to OK, we have to talk about this, and so the conversation ramped up, but we still, because it's not taught anywhere, it's a little bit uncomfortable. And I, I just thought, I like this stuff, and so maybe I can be the The middle person here between veterinarians who speak one language and personal finance, which is a different language.

And so I went back to school and got a master's degree in personal financial planning, and now I talked to veterinarians, at any stage in their career, honestly, but the ones who seem to be most hungry for it are younger veterinarians or vet students, and so that's where I would say the majority of my education comes from, but I just I do education and and I think the good thing is one, I, I can sort of think about it from a vet's perspective and make it a little bit more accessible and two, I'm not trying to sell anybody anything so like there's, there's credibility, but there's also trust because I'm you and I'm gonna give you this this the information for no financial gain for myself. And so I, it's gone pretty well, but I, I just, I love the topic personally and that's how it all got started. And I suppose, you know, the, the system in America with the, you know, the laws and the taxes and everything is different from the UK, Europe, Australia, you know, Asia, etc.

But there are some basic tenets that it doesn't matter what country you live in, there's basic stuff, you know, the old wisdom of setting aside some money that you put in for a rainy day is, that's a universal piece of advice, isn't it? Yeah, yep. Spend less than you make, save and invest the rest.

Yeah. You know, yeah. Brilliant.

I want to finish off because again, you know, we met up, I think, and this time also at VMX in January. We, we had some dinner together. I always think it's good, you know, as much as you can do all these things online, I know it's a bit silly for webinar vets to say it, but you can't beat a face to face meeting, can you?

I just shot myself in the foot, Brent with that. They, they, they compliment each other. You need that.

But we were talking about, and it, it was a really heartwarming story, so I'd love to share for you to share it again. I'm a big fan of Royal Cannon of, of the bigger group, because of some of the work that you do that probably, you know, in some ways now we're, we're not talking about some of these stories enough, and I, I've talked to you about that before, because I think they bring hope. And I think, you know, we live in a world now where.

There are, I, I think the Pope said there's something like 62 wars going on in his book about hope, you know, the previous Pope, Pope Francis. And, and, you know, we turn the news on and there's a lot of depressing stories, so on the whole, I don't watch a huge amount of news. And, and, and we need to be sending out those positive messages, which I think is what in a small way we try to do with our bet.

And, and I remember you talking about this dog training, this slightly alternative dog training that Royal Cannon helped to support, and it was alternative because of course the people that were doing it were er prison inmates. And you know, the American system from the films we see. Seems very much around retribution and not to actually, you know, re-educate people into a better way of thinking when we see the, you know, the films and so on.

So this was a really beautiful story, maybe if you could just share that in the last few minutes with people listening. Sure, there's this, there's a. Beginning to be more of these programmes in the US that actually connect people who are incarcerated and, and pets, mostly dogs, but sometimes cats and sometimes horses as well.

And where I live in Missouri, where Royal Keen in US is headquartered, we are involved with the Missouri programme and it's called Puppies for parole, and it was started by a warden many years ago who he thought exactly that, that there's there are opportunities here. To, you know, maybe do some good. And, and, and it actually started because he was touring rural Missouri shelters, and he was seeing a lot of dogs who were not being adopted.

And he asked the, the shelter people, you know, why are these dogs not being adopted? And many of them were young and a lot of them were pit bull mixes or lab mixes, but just very energetic breeds. And they said, well, they're great dogs.

They're just, they've got so much energy and they're in a cage all day and people come to adopt them, they open the cage and they just bound down and knock them over. And he said, well, what would help that? And they said, training, they just need to be trained.

And he said, well, I've got people with a lot of time on their hands. Could we train prisoners to train dogs? And they said, yeah, that that would be no problem.

And so, They started the pro the the process of getting that going. He went to the governor of the state and the governor said this sounds like a great idea, but just here's the thing, you get no funding for that. You no taxpayer money is going toward this programme.

They still made it happen and so they, they would bring dogs into the prison and they would train the prisoners how to train dogs and bring dogs in the prison, and the dogs live in the prison with two inmates for a certain period of time, and they're just trained around the clock and then they're still adopted out through that shelter, and it, you know, it makes the dogs more adoptable, so that's a win. What they found was that it had a huge impact on the prisoners themselves. Nobody's going to be surprised by that, knowing how much we know about the human animal bond, but, you know, if you are in this programme and you get in trouble, you're not in this programme anymore, so you don't get to train dogs.

And so the the prisoners in this programme, they don't do things to get themselves into trouble. In fact, they avoid trouble to stay training these dogs. And in talking to this warden, there was, there were just some Really interesting topics that came out of this really interesting conversations around These prisoners, they identify with the dogs in a way, because these dogs are in a shelter and they've sort of been cast off and and that's how these prisoners feel, and they know, the prisoners know that they're not getting out, many of them have life sentences.

But they see this opportunity through these dogs to sort of redeem themselves because they can make a better life for these dogs. And, and so there was this identification that went on and, and, and just to do something positive for society, a lot of these guys, they did something when they were in their late teens, early twenties, they've been incarcerated for 20 years. They're not the same people.

I'm not the same person I was in my teens and twenties. And so they've changed. Well, these dogs have brought about the change, and there have just been so many cases where Other humans haven't been able to get to these guys.

But the dogs get to these guys and so in a very strange way of saying it. Dogs have brought humanity to humans, and, and that's the power of dogs. I mean, again, no one listening to this podcast would be surprised to hear this, but The dogs are more adaptable and, and the prisoners get something out of it.

It's even gone as far as they've told me that there's, it relieves some of the tensions between the prisoners and and the staff of the prisons because oftentimes those will be the people who will adopt the dog. And so now the prisoner and the staff member who maybe were at odds for whatever reason, now they have a commonality and they get along better and so it's like when, when, when, and You know, you could go on and on, and so Roy Keenan got involved because when those dogs are in the prison, we provide the food for them while they're in there being trained because again there's no funding for that. So we just, we donate the food to the dogs to eat while they're in the prison so that they can do the training that they need to do and just I've been into the prisons a couple of times and it's just amazing what you see.

I mean, you see these, these people who are, you know, maybe they've done some really bad things, but the dogs. Have had such a hand and I don't know how else to say it, but maybe redeeming them, you know, changing when other people couldn't change them. That is the power of of dogs and God with we say sort of unconditional love isn't it?

You know, dogs love you unconditionally and if you turn dog around it becomes God doesn't it? It's an interesting word, isn't it? Yeah, yeah.

That that's so lovely and that's very much part of is it Royal Cannon Foundation work or is it that just Royal Cannon America that funds that is just working in US right now. It is not, it's not technically within the foundation, but we hope that it will grow and catch on in other countries to where one day it could be. It's such a beautiful story and it really moved me and that's why I wanted you to share it again, so thank you for doing that.

Because it's a, it's a lovely sort of holistic one health thing, isn't it, you know, that that whole concept of one health and, and mental health, and if you can bring people into a better place and pet's fantastic at doing that, we, we had a cat who adopted us during the pandemic and my wife became, From being ambivalent about cats, she's also allergic to cats. So, you know, sorry for throwing this in, but you haven't invented a diet yet that makes cats hypoallergenic to humans. One of the competitors has.

So, she's on that, he's on that food and it's made, Rachel now become a mad cat woman. And to some degree, you know, sometimes he comes over and he gives her a nip, which is basically saying you're working too hard, you need to stroke me more. And that whole act of stroking.

Just helps to reduce the cortisol, helps to reduce the stress. Animals, dogs and cats are fantastic at just. Taking the anger away, aren't they, if we don't allow them to.

They they are and interesting, my own dog came out of this programme too, so I'm a believer. Yeah, Brent. I always love speaking to you.

I definitely think we need another one on personal finance, cos we really just skated over that. I, I didn't realise you had a master's in it, so the lovely thing about the podcast is you learn by listening to clever people like yourself, but also those different facets. So we definitely need to spend some more time when you, I know how busy you are when you have some time free to talk about personal finance as well because it's such a an important area, but Brent, really appreciate your time and you know, thank you for all that you're doing for the profession.

Thank you, thank you. And thanks everyone for listening. I hope you've enjoyed the episode.

Hopefully you've found it interesting and we'll see you on a podcast or a webinar very soon. Take care, bye bye.