Have you met Craig, university veterinarian? Spend the next few minutes getting to know him a little better.
Where is your favourite place on campus?
Depends on the time of year and whether you’re talking indoors or outdoors. In the summer, it’s a combination of the water features around campus — there’s one beside SUB, one beside CAB — I love going to those. You see birds, squirrels, and things there. They’re like little oases on campus in the summer. In winter, it’s the street between St. Joseph’s and the Dentistry/Pharmacy building. The way the elm trees and older buildings line the street, it’s gorgeous. If we’re talking indoors, it would be what they call the “Harry Potter” room in the old Rutherford library.
Tablet or paper?
Both. I still like to use paper, but I also use my tablet and iPhone for taking notes and stuff. So probably some combination of the three. Sometimes it’s easier to pick up a pen and write stuff down, but I do use my phone and my tablet quite a lot.
Name one thing you’ve brought to work from home.
I have this little museum of veterinary items I collected in private practice. I’ve got this little piece of spine from a deer, some bladder stones from a dog, some worms from a cat, and some porcupine quills I pulled out of a dog. I used to do a lot of school talks in some of my previous jobs, and I’d take these out at those. Plus, my wife doesn’t really like me displaying them at home.
What is the one thing you can’t live without?
Coffee. I tried going with decaf coffee for a week one time and I discovered that I can’t really live without a morning dose of caffeine.
If you won airfare to anywhere in the world, where would you go?
Australia. I’ve never been there, and I’d like to dive on the Great Barrier Reef. I love snorkeling and I used to scuba dive, so if I could snorkel or get my scuba certification back, I’d love to do that.
You can invite anyone — alive or dead, real or fictional — to dinner. Who would it be?
I think I’d have to have a dinner party — there are a lot of people I’d like to bring. With my job as a veterinarian, there are two people in particular I’d love to have. One is an author people don’t tend to hear much about nowadays named James Herriot. He wrote books about practicing veterinary medicine in Yorkshire, England in the 1930s. That was before there were many anesthetics and no antibiotics, so how they cared for animals back then was very different than today. The second person is Sir William Osler. He was one of the founders of what we would call modern medicine. He also did work with animals and he was actually one of the first people to do comparative pathology. So he did work with both animals and with people. The modern field of what we would call one medicine was founded by him. I would love to sit down with two people like that and talk to them about veterinary medicine and how far it has come in the past 100 years. Where we are today and where we were 100 years ago is just so vastly different.
If you could switch jobs with someone else on campus for a week, what would you do?
I think it would be fun to do the job of some of the groundskeepers. Probably more so in the summer when they aren’t shoveling snow, unless I got to drive one of those cool snow-moving vehicles. But I love gardening, so it would be fun to plant flowers in the spring and do some of those jobs.
What does “uplifting the whole people” mean to you?
In my role as university veterinarian, I understand that human health and prosperity has improved so much as a result of our medical advances, and I think that has uplifted the whole people in terms of our ability to survive and prosper in the modern world. It hasn’t been equal — not all of those improvements have affected the developing world, and that’s a place where we have to make sure that they also get to some day. But part of uplifting the people has meant using animals in research to look at diseases and treatments, and I think we have done much better in the last fifty years in terms of improving the care and welfare of animals used in research. I think most people in Western Canada are accepting of the fact that we need to use animals in research but are concerned about the care of those animals. So I think uplifting the people has to include uplifting the animals that we’re responsible for as well.
If you could solve any problem in the world, what would it be?
There are so many, but if I had to pick one, it would be solving the heavy footprint we have had on the world around us. The expansion of cities and the need to expand our agriculture to feed the growing population and all of those things. Even if we switched to alternative energy sources, they’re not without their costs. It’s probably an unsolvable problem, or at least not immediately solvable. But I think working on how humans affect the world around us is important.
What 3 words best describe your U of A experience?
Fulfilling — I get the privilege of working with leaders in a wide variety of disciplines, and it’s fulfilling for me to work with these people who are intelligent and working in the cutting edges of their field.
Eclectic — my job has been interesting in that I get to work with a wide variety of people, both in the teaching that I’ve done in animal health and animal science programs in agriculture; and in this job where I’ve that the chance to work with people from a half a dozen or more faculties across campus that are involved in animal research.
Unanticipated — there’s a lot of things that come up in my work that I would never have thought I was going to have to deal with — a variety of issues and challenges we have to address. There’s lots of new things in my work every day.
About Craig Wilkinson
Dr. Craig Wilkinson received his BSc in Zoology from the University of Alberta and then his DVM from the Western College of Veterinary Medicine (U of Sask.) Craig worked in rural mixed practice and then companion animal practice and then served as shelter manager and veterinarian at the Edmonton Humane Society. Craig joined the University of Alberta Faculty of ALES in 2001 as Director of Animal Care. In 2015 he moved to the Research Ethics Office as university veterinarian, where he works with Animal Care and Use Committees and six other veterinarians and animal care staff in different faculties to ensure high standards of animal care across the university, in compliance within the guidelines of the Canadian Council on Animal Care. He teaches in several undergraduate courses in animal science and animal health and continues to do weekend shifts in private companion animal practice. Craig enjoys photography, hiking, and other outdoor activities.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.