There will be a new set of hands to care for Battle Ground pets starting Monday, Aug. 3, at Alder Creek Veterinary Clinic.
Dr. Cherise Smalley is a recent graduate of Oregon State University who has spent her whole life wanting to be involved in animal medicine.
“I’ve always been a horse girl, and so they always say that horse medicine, like horses, are the gateway drug to veterinary medicine,” Smalley said.
When Smalley was younger, her family had a veterinarian who would come to their house in Carnation, Washington, and make sure their horses were healthy.
“I was on (a) horse before I could walk,” Smalley said.
During the veterinarian’s visits, she got to see the animal doctor work up close.
“I just loved watching them and was like, ‘This looks so cool and, like, something that I would want to do for the rest of my life,’” Smalley said.
To get into the veterinary program at Oregon State University, the applicant must have an average GPA of 3.6 or higher for their undergraduate degree.
Additionally, the student must have several hours of shadowing experience in the veterinary field.
“I think the average is 2,000 hours of shadowing or some sort of assistant or reception work in a veterinary hospital,” Smalley said. “I had a gap year. It’s really hard to get the experience hours you need in undergrad, so I needed that gap year.”
Another reason she took a gap year was to gain residency in Oregon, the place where she was choosing to attend graduate school.
Smalley noted when she was looking for a school, there weren’t many options around the country. In all, there were maybe 30 graduate universities that offered a program.
Throughout the whole journey, Smalley said that the most interesting experience was doing necropsy rotation, a training program where vet students conduct autopsies on dead animals.
“It’s like a big jigsaw puzzle. You open a body and you don’t know why these animals died,” Smalley said.
She likened the process to being an FBI agent coming up with a timeline of how the body ended up the way it did.
However, not every animal autopsy was enjoyable to her, as she recalled when they once had to dissect a skunk. The smell was so bad that everyone ran from the room.
After eight years of education, with one gap year in between undergraduate and graduate schooling, Smalley graduated from OSU with her doctorate.
Though she didn’t have a job lined up right away, she did know where she would be heading to immediately after she finished schooling.
“I got married a month ago, and my husband and I have known each other for eight years, and he’s worked the last five years in Battle Ground,” Smalley said. “We always knew that, when I graduated, I was going to move up here.”
Opportunity found Smalley when she got in touch with Alder Creek Veterinary Clinic.
Two weeks after working with them, they decided to hire Smalley to be their newest veterinarian.
Through the entire pursuit of her career, only one thing changed — the category of animals where she would be specialized.
“Horses, they’re sport animals, so it’s getting them to be a sporting animal, whereas your dogs and cats are companion animals,” Smalley said.
To her, being a horse doctor was more like being a sports medicine doctor, whereas tending to cats and dogs was more like being a family physician.
“As much as I love my horses, I wanted to keep it a hobby,” Smalley said. “In some ways, we have more advancements in dog and cat care, and I think the medicine there is kind of more fascinating.”
Though she didn’t end up exactly where her younger self thought she would, Smalley is still getting to live out her childhood passion by caring for animals.
