Dear Friends,
Shelter dog adoptions are stagnating even here in Ithaca, as the world around us is rocked by war and uncertainty and the weather turns cold again. Yet, amid these shifts and difficulties, we find resilience in the animal and human connections we make. Maddie’s® Shelter Medicine Program [MSMP] has been extremely fortunate to have support from so many individuals and institutions far and wide, including you. 
The start of our year brought a (relatively) mild winter, which made walking all the dogs a little less terrible! We enjoyed teaching Introduction to Shelter Medicine (Dr. Lena DeTar) and a new “flipped” version of Companion Animal Welfare (Dr. Erin Henry) to eager first- and third-year vet students. In February we helped Cornell’s second-year club leaders pull off their annual HSVMA Spay Day; with MSMP faculty Drs. Henry and Aly Cohen at the helm, volunteer veterinarians and technicians mentored several dozen students as they successfully spayed and neutered 50 locally owned cats, all on one freezing Saturday morning.
In March, Suzette Moschetti, Maddie’s® Shelter Medicine Program Coordinator, and Kelsey Arrison, MSMP’s LVT, helped launch our monthly Cornell Vet CARES Community Cat Clinics for 2023, which vaccinated and sterilized over 260 Cornell community cats this year. Even Gail Babcock, our program and department’s administrative lead, joined us to help in surgical recovery.
April and May were busy with spring classes (and kittens of course,) with Advanced Shelter Medicine (Drs. DeTar, Henry and Elizabeth Berliner) and Forensics (Drs. DeTar, Henry and Sean McDonough) and student rotations. Dr. DeTar also travelled to several national conferences to promote the ASV’s 2nd Edition of the Guidelines for Standards of Care in Animal Shelters, and to Toronto to connect with ringworm research colleagues. This spring, with Kelsey and interns taking the lead, we started biweekly outreach medical clinics for the Humane Society of Schuyler County.
In June, we were sad and proud to see our 2022-23 interns Drs. Emily Boccia and Abby Reichard leave us for bigger and better things: the Massachusetts SPCA in Cape Cod, and the ASPCA Shelter Medicine Residency, respectively. This also meant we had the pleasure of welcoming Drs. Anna Young (Cornell ’23) and Sarah G. Matthews (Colorado State ’23) as our 2023-24 MSMP interns. They jumped in feet first, championing care for some of our most challenging cases- Poppy, a kitten who suffered burns and tendinopathies after being microwaved, and Geodude, a puppy whose rough start and behavior challenges were compounded by bilateral severe carpal laxity. (see card front, up top)
We celebrated the 20thAnniversary of our ASPCA/Cornell/Maddie’s® Shelter Medicine Conference in mid-July, back in person at the vet college with over 450 attendees, a keynote by ASPCA CEO Matt Bershadker, and speeches by conference founders Drs. Leslie Appel and Lila Miller. Dr. Jan Scarlett, professor emerita and the founder of the shelter medicine program at Cornell, also received much appreciation.
Front row, left to right: Suzette Moschetti, Dr. Erin Henry, Dr. Anna Young & Dr. Aly Cohen
In the fall, we were excited to recruit Dr. Renee Staffeld (Cornell ’20) as a full-time clinical instructor, leaving a bustling clinic in Colorado for a drastic change in pace (teaching is slow!) She brings excellent skills in surgery, medicine and population management, matched by her contagious enthusiasm. Dr. Staffeld arrived just in time to join Dr. Scarlett and the interns for their annual Study Design Boot Camp and to restart our weekly journal club after the hectic summer (did I mention dogs and kittens?)
The new year brings the hiring of the next Janet L. Swanson Director of Maddie’s® Shelter Medicine Program and adjusting our team accordingly. In the meantime, I am extremely grateful for assistance, commitment, support, and comradery as I temporarily filled and learned this role. We are also extremely grateful for all the shelters that help us learn and teach in this field, and all the animals that remind us why we love this work.
Thank you once again for supporting our program.
Sincerely,
Lena DeTar, DVM, DACVPM, DABVP-SMP
Associate Clinical Professor
Interim Director, Maddie’s® Shelter Medicine Program
Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine
