by Dr. Jan Pol
“We’re not fighting,” I told her. “We’re debating.”
“Well, you’re awfully loud about it.”
I agreed, “We’re debating loudly. We have to scream to get our point across.”
You always help your kids in any way you can, but at first I didn’t think this was such a great idea. Or, to be honest, at second or third either. Charles said, “Dad, we should make a reality show about you.” I told him it seemed to me that there were enough reality shows on TV. “I know,” he agreed, “but they’re not real. We want to do a real reality show.”
Charles also made the point that overall the entertainment industry hasn’t been especially supportive of the family farmer in recent years, and this would give us the chance to show how hard farmers work and how well they treat their animals. He reminded me of the thing I’ve been saying his whole life: If you don’t treat animals well, they won’t treat you well.
Charles didn’t exactly dare me to do it, but he made it clear it was sort of a challenge. Basically, I thought, Why not? It’ll never get off the ground. And no matter what happened, for me this was a good opportunity to spend some time with my son, whom Diane and I didn’t get to see as often as we liked. So in the summer of 2010 Charles came out to Michigan with three other people to film what is called a “sizzle reel.” It’s a brief, four- or five-minute film used to sell a show.
They filmed for about seven days and ended with twenty-seven hours of tape. It was nothing special, just me doing my job and a little bit at home. During that time we went on a call to a small dairy farm and discovered a small calf that had broken its leg. The farmer couldn’t afford to pay for reconstructive surgery and he didn’t want to pay for me to put a cast on the leg. He didn’t believe that the leg could ever support the full weight of a dairy cow, so he asked me to put the calf down. But with the farmer’s okay I used a long piece of PVC pipe as a splint and duct-taped it around the calf’s leg. I went back a couple of weeks later and that little calf was hobbling around just fine. It was still limping, but it definitely was going to live. The farmer didn’t allow the crew to film any of that, but it made a real impression on them, and those people who still work on the show talk about it occasionally.
One afternoon they filmed me with my horses; one of them, the only one left that we’d brought from the Netherlands, was real friendly. She comes right up to me and I can handle her without a halter. She never fights me, whatever I want to do. I happen to love the smell of horses, and I know that horses greet each other by blowing into each other’s nostrils. So while they were filming she came up to greet me and I put my head against her muzzle. In the photograph it looked like I was kissing this horse. I had no problem with that.
The truth is, I have never had any problem making fun of myself. That never bothered me. But please, don’t ever call a large-animal vet a ham. That’s bad for business. Diane was a member of an organization called the Jaycettes, the female version of the Junior Chamber of Commerce. One time they had to put on a play for a district meeting and didn’t have enough volunteers. Diane told me a friend of ours would dress as a woman and be in it if I would, and that man’s wife told him the same thing about me. I agreed—but he backed out. I stuck big balloons under a tight sweater; I wore nylons and put on a blond wig and a short skirt. I can tell you, no man with a mustache who puts balloons under a sweater and pretends to be a woman is going to have any problem kissing a horse.
Charles and Jon began taking this sizzle reel around to the different cable networks trying to sell the show. As I’d predicted, there wasn’t a lot of interest in a show about a seventy-year-old vet kissing horses and getting very familiar with cows. They got turned down by a lot of places. One cable network executive explained to them, “We want people to stay tuned to our programming. This is a channel changer.” Other networks were nicer, telling them nobody in the world would be interested in this show. Finally they went to a new channel, Nat Geo Wild, which was going to be all about animals. “He’s kind of a funky guy,” they said. “And he kisses horses. Maybe we should give it a try.”
Charles and Jon came back to Weidman with a ten-person crew and shot four pilot episodes in four weeks. Even then I wasn’t taking the whole thing very seriously. My attitude was Just enjoy this while it’s going on. It’s a little bit different and it isn’t going to last very long. While some of the people on the crew had been around animals, most of them hadn’t, so I did have some fun with them. The thing that caught their attention right away was how easily, and how often, I stuck my hand up a cow’s butt. That wasn’t exactly something people in the entertainment business see too often; in fact, one day I had a lot of fun with them. I reached deep inside and pulled out a big wad of manure and smelled it. I could hear their Oooohhhhhh moans, so I smiled into the camera and told them, “That smells like money to me.”
Then we were invited to be at the Television Critics Association, which is a bunch of journalists and bloggers who preview all the new shows and write about them. I was on the stage with a man who hunts big cats in the wild to put radio collars on them, a man in search of the world’s sixty deadliest animals, and an Australian who is a crocodile relocator. The relocator catches wild water buffalo in his spare time. When I was up there with him, I was thinking, What the heck am I doing here with these guys?
Then all of our shows went on the air. They ran The Incredible Dr. Pol—I had nothing to do with that name, by the way, though one time I did ask Diane if she wanted to call me the Incredible Dr. Pol. She didn’t. And people watched it. So they ran it again. Then they had a marathon and the audience continued growing bigger and bigger. And eventually the show became Nat Geo Wild’s most popular program.
The success of the show pretty much surprised everybody. Instead of the original three people, all of a sudden there were twenty-five people working full-time on the show. I made one rule right at the beginning, and we haven’t changed it: The animals come first. I told the crew that I wasn’t going to change the way I did my job and it was up to them to keep up with me. “Nature doesn’t wait for film crews,” I said, “so I’m not going to either.” The film crews had a lot to learn about life, and death, on the farm. One time we got a call to go to Dave Livermore’s alpaca ranch, because one of his birds was about to have a cría—that’s the Spanish word for a baby alpaca. When it’s born it’s called a creation. The crew wanted to film the birth, so they actually camped out there for twenty-four hours just waiting. I was laughing. “You guys can wait forever,” I told them. “It isn’t going to happen.”
“Oh yeah,” they told me, “it is.”
“Have fun,” I said, and when the cría wasn’t born, they packed up their cameras.
I was on call a week later on a Saturday afternoon when Dave Livermore called me again and told me the cría’s head and one leg were out, but the rest wasn’t coming. “Is it alive?” I asked him. It was alive. “I’m on my way.” Normally the crew doesn’t follow me on the weekend, but I called Charles and told him the alpaca was giving birth. Then I got in the car and flew low.
I was there in less than five minutes. I got there before the film crew. That cría was too valuable for Dave to wait for some cameras. I pushed the head back in as much as I could and managed to turn it enough to get the other leg out. I pulled the cría out alive and kicking. It took me five minutes and I was already cleaning up when Charles and Jon Schroder showed up and saw that little creation being introduced to the world.
It took some time, but we finally figured out the best way to film the show. There are three four-person camera crews: One is supposed to stay with me, the second one is supposed to hopscotch ahead and get to my next appointment to get the lights and cameras set up, and the third crew is with Dr. Brenda or in the clinic. Probably the hardest thing for the first crew to do is just keep up with me. So I did make a compromise for them; I’ve slowed down a bit when I drive—but sometimes they still can
’t keep up. And sometimes they get lost; they get very, very lost.
Also, I go where I’m needed and sometimes that means I don’t follow the schedule. The crew will be set up and waiting for me, thinking they got me this time, when we get an emergency farm call. The weather doesn’t help them too much either: At least twice we’ve had to pull their cars out of snowbanks.
When we first started filming the show, the crew had a lot to learn about working in this part of Michigan. But I was impressed right away by their talent and dedication. The first time I worked with cameraman Mark Myers, for example, was a bitterly cold day in winter. I’m used to that weather and wear the proper clothing. The crew was filming an interview outdoors with a client, the wind was howling, and the temperature was dropping. Mark was holding on to a metal rod at the end of the camera; he was losing feeling in his fingers, but he didn’t say a word until the interview was completed. Then he went back to the car and put on some hand warmers, but it was a little too late; he never got the feeling back in the end of his pinky. When something like that happened—and believe me, that was not the only time—I began to realize they were serious about this show.
At the beginning, there was some question about how our clients would feel about being filmed, especially our Amish clients. There wasn’t much I could do to help there, although most of these people knew me and trusted me. But there have been cases that were filmed that the clients did not want shown for personal reasons. At the beginning of the second season, a client brought in this friendly little basset hound. The owner had left it on a metal chain, which had somehow gotten wrapped around the dog’s leg and cut off the circulation. We had to amputate the leg to save that dog’s life, but the client refused permission to film it. I didn’t blame him. It was an accident, but there were some people who might have blamed him.
Ironically, because the channel isn’t carried by our cable network, only those clients with satellite television get to see the show when it is initially broadcast. One time we hosted a kind of marathon viewing for our neighbors and we had videotapes of some of the shows running upstairs and downstairs, but other than that, people in our area generally have to wait until the show is available on the Internet. Because Charles is a producer, he gets unedited versions and sometimes shows them to Diane and me, but often the show gets edited even further after that. We had a friend who brought her dog in and agreed to be filmed. We always tell our clients we have nothing to do with the editing and have no power to decide what’s in or what’s out. The editors are the people who take the mountain of tape the camera operators shoot and turn it into one entertaining hour. Diane and I are as surprised as anyone else when we see what makes it on the air. The only difference is that when we finally get to see the show, we also know what didn’t make it. When we watched the show on Charles’s computer, this woman and her dog were in it, so Diane told her she was in the show. Unfortunately, when it was broadcast, though they did show the woman walking up to the clinic with her dog, the whole case was cut out. We felt terrible about that, and since that time we always tell people who ask that we haven’t seen the edited version of the show.
I don’t really know how other shows work, but for the most part we’ve kept our crew pretty much together, and we’ve all gotten to know one another, and respect one another, and in many cases become friends. There have been times when I’ve had to have them help me. I was on a farm call one time with Charles and field producer Mike Stankevich. I was trying to pull a calf that had decided it wasn’t interested in being born. It was fighting me pretty good and I needed people on the calf pullers while I maneuvered it around inside. I had Charles on one end and Mike on the other end, and I was screaming instructions at them. I was not going to lose this calf or its mother. Finally I had them pulling pretty good, and that calf said, Okay, I’ll be born now, and it came practically shooting out. The second it stopped fighting, Charles and Mike went flying backward and hit the ground. That calf came out alive and ready to start kicking. And Charles and Mike didn’t get one frame of film.
Of course I’m going to use crew members if they’re there. In March 2014 a dairy farm had a cow struggling to give birth. When I got there I discovered that cow had a twisted uterus and the only way to save it was to get it untwisted and get that calf out of there. The best chance we had to save this cow was for me to grab hold of the calf in the uterus while the cow was rolled, which could untwist it. The client didn’t want this filmed, but the crew had come along with me anyway. That was perfect; I needed them to roll the cow. We began rolling that cow back and forth, back and forth. I wasn’t about to give up. We rolled it again and again. Finally, on our fifth try, we got the uterus straightened out—and as we did, the tail slipped out of Mike Stankevich’s hands and whacked me right in the head. I was able to go in there and pull out the calf, which unfortunately was dead—but we had saved the cow.
We’ve also had to teach some of the crew members how to be safe around animals. A lot of them grew up with Disney animals, and I don’t think any character ever got stomped or had an eye poked in a Disney cartoon. One thing about our camera crew—they always want to get closer; they always want to get the best possible shot. We have had people get knocked over and stepped on—even Charles, who knows better but sort of forgot about it trying to get the best possible story.
I think what has been the hardest thing for the members of the crew to deal with is the fact that in this “real reality” show, the cases don’t always have a happy ending. What they probably weren’t prepared for, coming from Hollywood, was the reality of dealing with life and death every day, sometimes several times a day. I’ve had several members of our crew tell me how tough it is for them, at least at first, to see me euthanize an animal. Jon Schroder, who created the show with Charles, told me that sometimes he’d wake up in the morning praying he wouldn’t have to witness euthanasia that day. I rarely cry, but I still feel it; a lot of crew members have cried, and occasionally when we’re dealing with an old animal they still do. In several instances I’ve had to put down horses around thirty years old that the owners have had most of their lives. It breaks your heart to see that. While I would never say I’m used to it, I am able to separate my job from my emotions—and I honestly believe I’m doing a favor for these animals. But for the crew this is all new, and sometimes I see the tears coming down their faces while they’re running the camera. Normally there is always a lot of chattering going on—we’ve always got a lot to talk about—but after I’ve had to put down a beloved horse or a dog or a cat or almost any kind of pet, the silence can get very, very loud. But as Jon has said, “It’s never enjoyable, but it is something you get used to after a while, and you even accept the fact that it’s the most humane thing to do for the animal.”
Diane and I, and just about everybody who works at the practice, have bonded with the crew. It really has become a nice situation for all of us, and most of the time it’s like being with friends. A couple of the crew members even moved their families here while they were shooting. And we’ve also become involved with their animals. When we first starting shooting the show, Jon had a fifteen-year-old pit bull named Hazel who was very sick. He was told there wasn’t too much that could be done for the dog. He drove from Los Angeles to Michigan with that dog, and we were able to keep it alive with a good quality of life for almost another year.
We had another dog, a mixed-breed collie that had been run over by a car just before Thanksgiving in 2013. The county brought it to the clinic and we were able to save its life. Its leg was broken, so we put it in a cast. We had no idea who owned this dog or why it was running free. We waited a couple of weeks and nobody claimed it; in the meantime, two different people on the crew had become attached to it, and both of them said they might want to adopt it. But when some people in town showed interest, they were given preference.
Most of the crew went home for the holiday, and while they were gone I had to amputate the
dog’s broken leg. The people in town decided they didn’t want it anymore and a member of the crew adopted it—and naturally he named it Skippy.
But maybe the real test of the crew’s commitment was doing a pregnancy check. This is something we do practically every day, but for people who haven’t done it, the thought of putting an arm all the way inside a cow—especially a cow filled with manure—is probably a lot more difficult than the reality of it. Even though Charles had grown up inside the business, he had never done it, for example. So one day after I’d done some pregnancy checks, I asked the crew if they wanted to try it. Not everybody wanted to do it, but several people did. Some of the people had excuses—one of our producers told me, “I don’t want to hurt the cow!” “Oh,” I said to him, “don’t worry about it. You won’t. She won’t even know you’re visiting!” I showed them how to do it and explained what they should expect to feel. I know the thing that surprised everyone was how much room there is inside a cow and how hot it is. Believe me, it’s hot in there. We spent about an hour doing it, and months later we were still talking about it.
I don’t think it is an especially good way for people to bond, but in our situation it worked very well. Charles was one of the first to go, and he went right ahead and stuck his arm up the cow’s butt. Then he smiled as if he’d found something; he hadn’t. I remember after producer Pete Berg, pulled his manure-covered arm out, he said, “High five!” And we raised our hands way up in the air and slapped hard—and manure splattered all over the place.
Maybe that would be a good way for some of these Wall Street firms to bring their people together.
Diane and I have been surprised by so many of the things that have happened because of the show, but honestly nothing has been more enjoyable than watching Charles become an important part of it. Initially that wasn’t any part of the plan. Charles was the creator and a producer; it wasn’t even determined if he’d be on the show. But in small ways at first his role as the comic relief grew and became more important. That’s Charles on the screen; the camera brings out that part of his personality. Charles has spent his whole life trying to make people happy, often at his own expense. Diane has warned me, for example, not to mention that video he made in college in which he dressed up as a woman wearing red bikini underpants. Dressed as a woman? Like father like son!