AVMA spotlights Kevin Fitzgerald on kindness and conservation

CURRENT FULL VERSION: AVMA’s My Veterinary Life has revisited Dr. Kevin Fitzgerald in a new episode, “Kindness, Community, and Conservation: An Update with Dr. Kevin Fitzgerald,” giving the longtime Denver veterinarian a platform to reflect on his memoir, It Started With a Turtle, and on what he sees as the profession’s enduring values after 43 years in practice. Fitzgerald is widely recognized as a small animal veterinarian, author, comedian, and former Emergency Vets personality, but the new episode’s framing is notably broader: it ties clinical work to kindness, civic engagement, and conservation. (podcasts.apple.com)

That emphasis fits a longer arc in Fitzgerald’s career. Beyond companion animal practice at Alameda East in Denver, he has spent years in public-facing veterinary communication and conservation work, and he currently appears on the Denver Zoo Conservation Alliance board. His memoir rollout in 2025 also reinforced that blend of medicine, media, and environmental advocacy, presenting his career as one shaped as much by conservation and public storytelling as by hospital practice. (denverzoo.org)

The AVMA episode itself appears to be part of a broader editorial pattern for My Veterinary Life, which has recently featured return conversations with veterinary figures whose work extends beyond traditional practice settings. In Fitzgerald’s case, the Apple Podcasts listing says the episode highlights kindness, community involvement, and lifelong learning as core veterinary values, alongside a retrospective on his career and his memoir. That may sound soft compared with regulatory or clinical news, but it reflects a real professional conversation about what sustains veterinarians, and what helps the profession maintain public trust. (podcasts.apple.com)

That pattern is clearer when Fitzgerald’s episode is read alongside other recent My Veterinary Life installments. In “Be Kind and Be Brave,” Drs. Kristin Jankowski and Sheena Warman discuss the AAVMC Spectrum of Care initiative, drawing a direct line between veterinary kindness and practical access-to-care models. Jankowski’s work at the nonprofit Open Door Veterinary Collective and Warman’s background in mixed practice, referral medicine, and veterinary education frame Spectrum of Care not as lowering standards, but as helping clinicians meet patients and clients where they are. In “Compassion and Compression,” North Carolina State veterinary student Mary Emfinger describes entering the field through shelter work in a parvovirus ICU, later confronting burnout, returning to prerequisites from a nontraditional history-and-theater background, and building a compression sock business while serving in student leadership. And in “Can You Do Something,” Dr. Jon Geller updates listeners on veterinary relief efforts that began at the Ukraine-Romania border, where teams were checking animals crossing with refugees for welfare and infectious-disease risks, including zoonotic and other One Health concerns, before later adapting support as the war evolved and expanding aid efforts to Gaza. Taken together, those episodes show AVMA using the podcast not just for career storytelling, but to surface recurring themes of courage, adaptability, access, and service. (podcasts.apple.com)

Additional context from Cornell’s 2025 veterinary podcast with Dr. Steve Osofsky helps explain why this matters now. Osofsky, a leading wildlife health and policy figure, explicitly connects One Health to conservation and, increasingly, planetary health, arguing that animal, human, and ecosystem health are inseparable. While Fitzgerald’s AVMA appearance is a personal update rather than a policy announcement, it lands in the same conceptual space: veterinarians as connectors across companion animal care, community wellbeing, and biodiversity. The same is true, in different ways, of the recent AVMA episodes on Spectrum of Care and humanitarian response, which translate those big frameworks into everyday decisions about affordability, triage, public trust, and cross-border disease risk. (vet.cornell.edu)

Direct expert reaction to Fitzgerald’s latest AVMA episode was limited in public sources, but outside coverage of his memoir and speaking appearances points to the same themes. University of Colorado Boulder described him in 2025 as simultaneously a veterinarian, comedian, author, and conservationist, while conservation and community groups in Colorado continue to feature him as a public speaker. Those signals suggest Fitzgerald’s message resonates because it offers a model of veterinary leadership that is outward-facing and culturally legible, not confined to clinical authority alone. (colorado.edu)

Why it matters: For veterinary professionals, this story is really about scope. In a period when the field is still grappling with burnout, workforce strain, moral stress, and questions about access to care, narratives that re-anchor the profession in kindness, community presence, and a broader social mission can be more than feel-good content. They can influence recruitment, retention, and how veterinarians explain their value to pet parents, policymakers, donors, and partner sectors. Fitzgerald’s career also illustrates that conservation and public engagement aren’t side interests reserved for specialists; they can be part of a veterinarian’s public role, even for someone rooted in companion animal medicine. Recent My Veterinary Life episodes sharpen that point by showing the same profession through different lenses: Jankowski and Warman on being “kind and brave” in access-to-care decisions, Emfinger on compassion and student resilience after emotionally intense shelter medicine work, and Geller on acting quickly in humanitarian crises using veterinary skills to support both animals and displaced people. (podcasts.apple.com)

There’s also a practical communications lesson here. Veterinary institutions are increasingly using podcasts and other low-barrier media to shape the profession’s internal culture and public-facing identity. AVMA’s choice to spotlight Fitzgerald again, and to surround that episode within a run of conversations about Spectrum of Care, student entrepreneurship and burnout, and international relief work, suggests that organized veterinary medicine sees value in stories that connect clinical work to larger ethical, social, and ecological questions. Cornell’s parallel decision to elevate Osofsky’s One Health perspective points in the same direction. (podcasts.apple.com)

What to watch: The next signal will be whether these themes stay in the realm of storytelling or show up more concretely in veterinary education, association programming, conservation partnerships, access-to-care initiatives, and practice-level community engagement efforts over the coming year. (vet.cornell.edu)