As long-time animal docs move toward retiring, new vets visit, consider taking over Gainesville clinic


Bob Main and Robin Deck

Bryan Luark and Katlin Hornig

Veterinarian Katlin Hornig, shown in these two photos , and veterinarian Bryan Luark, 2016 and 2015 graduates of Colorado State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine now living in Clovis, New Mexico, will be in Ozark County March 16-29 to shadow Robin Deck and Bob Main at the Gainesville Veterinary Clinic. Hornig and Luark are considering taking over the practice and establishing a new home here. The community is invited to an open house for the couple to be held at the clinic from 1 to 4 p.m. Wednesday, March 18. Like local vet Bob Main, Luark practices mostly on large animals. Hornig says she enjoys working with every kind of animal – from cows to alligators.

Veterinarians Robin Deck and Bob Main, who’ve operated the Gainesville Veterinary Clinic since moving here in 1985, say they’re ready to retire, but they don’t want to leave Ozark County without any practicing veterinarians. So they’re hoping two veterinarians from America’s Southwest will like what they see when they come to visit March 16-29 – and will choose to make Ozark County their new home.
Katlin Hornig and Bryan Luark, now living in Clovis, New Mexico, say they’re looking for a new place to establish a home and a practice after working for a while under contract for separate veterinary practices in Clovis. The Colorado natives – and graduates of Colorado State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine – came through the Ozarks a few years ago as they were traveling to Ohio to visit relatives. They “fell in love with the area,”
Hornig said Monday in a phone call with the Times.
The two younger veterinarians (Luark graduated from vet school in 2015; Hornig graduated in 2016) recently met with Deck and Main during a brief visit to Ozark County a few weeks ago. Now they’re working on completing their Missouri veterinary medicine licensure, hoping it can be completed in time so they can do hands-on work while shadowing Deck and Main when they’re here in March. If the paperwork isn’t completed and approved in time, they’ll still accompany Deck and Main as observers, Hornig said.
She and Luark have worked in practices similar to those of Deck and Main. Like Main, Luark specializes in large animal medicine and especially likes working on cows and horses, Hornig said. She is an “everything” veterinarian and usually treats smaller animals but welcomes whatever comes her way, she said, laughing as she told about “performing C-sections on snakes” and even treating an alligator while she was practicing in southern Colorado. “I never wanted to be a veterinarian who had a little boy come in with his pet iguana and had to tell him I couldn’t work on that kind of animal,” Hornig said.   
The community is invited to meet the veterinary duo at an open house scheduled for 1 to 4 p.m. Wednesday, March 18, at the Gainesville Vet Clinic.
Both Hornig and Luark come from small towns. Luark grew up on a cattle ranch in central Colorado outside the tiny town of Burns, which has “a Baptist church and post office – and about 100 people,” Hornig said. She grew up near Alamosa in southern Colorado and graduated from Sargent High School, where “there were 27 kids in my graduating class,” she said.
After graduating from vet school, Luark went home to help on his family’s ranch for a year, and Hornig returned to southern Colorado to work with a “90-year-old veterinarian who was still practicing,” she said. Later, they settled in Clovis when Luark got a job with a dairy cattle practice. Hornig worked in Clovis at a mixed-animal practice that also did veterinary work for the local PetSmart store, where she treated “anything and everything,” she said. “I loved it.”
As their latest contracts were coming up for renewal, “we talked about whether Clovis is where we wanted to be,” Hornig said. They remembered their visits to the Ozarks and made contact with Deck about visiting the Gainesville practice.  
Now they have quit their jobs in Clovis, and they’re getting their house there ready to sell while carefully pondering their future. Meanwhile, Hornig has been doing temporary two-week stints of emergency vet work in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and in El Paso, Texas. “I just can’t stand to stay away from veterinary medicine for long,” she said.
During their upcoming two weeks here, they’re hoping to see (and practice, if the licensure is completed) a wide variety of veterinary medicine.  For Luark it means “the more cows, the merrier,” Hornig said. For herself, she’s hoping to see “as much veterinary medicine as possible – the more surgeries I do and the more animals I see, the happier I am,” she said.
If all goes well, sometime in the near future – “as soon as possible, if things work out,” Hornig said – she and Luark will take over the Gainesville clinic and find some land here where Luark can establish his own cattle ranch.
If the vet clinic hand-off happens, Deck and Main will get to do some visiting, some traveling and those other things retirees enjoy. “All my friends are retired,” Deck said Monday, “and I want to have time to do those things – and do horse shows and fun stuff like that.”
Their two sons live in St. Louis and in Peoria, Illinois. No grandkids yet, but like many retirees-to-be, they’re hoping.
And just as Deck and Main look forward to stepping back from their decades of veterinary work, Hornig says she and Luark are excited at the prospects of returning to small-town life and working through the challenges of a small-town practice.
“I think we get excited, thinking about working and living in a small community again,” she said. “The heart of us is that we love rural veterinary medicine – dogs, cats, horses, cows, goats and everything else that comes through that door.”

Ozark County Times

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