Veterinarian joins staff at Gainesville Animal Clinic

Veterinarian Donna Cook is joining Dr. Robin Deck and Dr. Robert Main at the Gainesville Animal Clinic beginning this month, working part-time, usually on Mondays, and specializing in the care of small animals. 

Cook, no stranger to small towns, grew up in Pond Creek, Oklahoma, and for a while had her own mixed-animal practice in Leslie, Arkansas, population 300. 

She started her post-secondary education at Northeast Oklahoma A&M, a junior college in Miami, which she attended on a basketball scholarship. She graduated from Oklahoma State University with a bachelor’s degree in agriculture in 1981 and graduated from veterinary medical school in 1984. 

She started practicing in Conway, Arkansas in 1984 before moving to Leslie, where she remained until 2008, when a devastating flood filled her clinic with 5 1/2 feet of water, and she lost everything she owned, she said. 

She did relief work in Arkansas for a few years and then joined the Animal Health Center in Mountain Home, Arkansas, continuing there until August 2018.

Cook now lives in Ava with her husband, John Sutton, and her two rescue dogs, a cat, and her husband’s border collie. She met Gainesville small-animal veterinarian Robin Deck through Dr. John Bressett at Midway (Arkansas) Animal Clinic, when he invited some of the veterinarians in the area to a get-together. She’s looking forward to being at the Gainesville Animal Clinic one day a week, she said.

Being a veterinarian is something she’s known she wanted to do since seventh grade, Cook told the Times last week. Her love of animals may have derived from the fact that “animals don’t judge,” she said, “and we get more confirmation around animals that we do around people.”