Texas A&M Veterinary Emergency Team Receives $5M in State Funding To Support Disaster Relief Efforts
Story by Ainsley Treesh, VMBS Marketing & Communications
With the investment by the Texas Legislature and Gov. Greg Abbott through Senate Bill 1, the VET can build a new foundation for its teaching, outreach, and response programming.
As the first and largest team of its kind in the country, the Texas A&M Veterinary Emergency Team (VET) plays a critical role in supporting Texas A&M University’s disaster response efforts by ensuring animals impacted by disaster have a second chance at life and educating the next generation of veterinary responders.
Since the VET was formed in 2009, the team has provided life-saving veterinary care to search and rescue teams and residential animals across 28 deployments, working alongside federal and state emergency responders — often at the request of the Texas A&M Task Force — during disasters such as Hurricanes Harvey, Helene, and Ian, as well as the Butte County, California, and Texas Panhandle Smokehouse Creek wildfires.
In addition to emergency response, the VET’s missions include outreach efforts across the state and training future Aggie veterinarians in the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences through an emergency preparedness and response clinical rotation, through which fourth-year veterinary students spend two weeks participating in hands-on, interactive learning experiences as they develop county-level emergency response plans.
Since 2012, the VET and fourth-year veterinary students have served more than 100 counties across Texas.
Recognizing the team’s impact on the state, the Texas Legislature has allocated $2.5 million a year to the VET to support its operations. Gov. Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 1 on June 22.
“From the caring for nearly 1,000 animals in South Texas every summer as part of Operation Border Health, to supporting communities across the state through disaster planning, to preparing our veterinary students to serve as leaders in their communities, the Veterinary Emergency Team plays a critical role in fulfilling Texas A&M’s land-grant mission of supporting the people — and animals — of Texas,” said Dr. John R. August, Carl B. King Dean of Veterinary Medicine at Texas A&M. “We are most appreciative of the Texas Legislature for providing the support needed to sustain the team’s important work.”
“We are extremely excited and incredibly grateful to the Texas Legislature, Gov. Abbott, and Texas A&M University President Mark Welsh for their support of our team,” said Dr. Deb Zoran, director of the VET. “For the past 15 years, we’ve been living from deployment to deployment. With this new funding, we’ll have the ability to grow, replace old equipment, hire new people, and build a new home for our teaching and response program.”
Currently, the VET comprises one full-time and one part-time faculty member, two staff members, and 56 volunteers who support the team.
The impacts of these funds will help advance the VET’s mission of serving Texas and the nation every day.
“With this money, we can build the foundation of people necessary to advance the program and make it stable for years to come,” Zoran said.
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For more information about the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, please visit our website at vetmed.tamu.edu or join us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Contact Information: Jennifer Gauntt, Director of VMBS Communications, Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, jgauntt@cvm.tamu.edu, 979-862-4216
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