Amy Parsons: Hi, I’m Amy Parsons, President of Colorado State University and host of The Next 150 podcast. We have so many remarkable people in our community, and this is where we’re going to hear their stories, we’re going to get their perspectives on CSU’s next 150 years and gather their very best advice for today’s CSU students. Let’s get started, Rams.

Well, hello, Rams, and welcome to another episode of The Next 150. We are absolutely thrilled to have today’s guest with us, the renowned Dr. Kwane Stewart, a proud 1997 graduate Doctor of Veterinary Medicine program in our College of Vet Med and Biomedical Sciences, famously known as Kwane, the Street Vet. Thank you for being here. He’s back on campus this week to accept his distinguished alumni award from the college last night. Over his 28-year career, Kwane has worked across nearly every corner of the profession, refining both his clinical and his business expertise.

After graduating, Kwane began his career as an associate and emergency clinician before becoming chief medical officer at Vetco Hospitals in 2002. Went on to serve as chief veterinary officer of American Humane and director of their legacy program, No Animals Were Harmed, which protects more than 100,000 animals every year on film and television sets around the globe. He also serves as Netflix’s veterinary consultant in charge of animal oversight, working behind the scenes on films from War Horse to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Kwane is perhaps best known as the co-founder of Project Street Vet, a nonprofit providing free veterinary care to pets belonging to people experiencing homelessness. Project Street Vet delivers quality, no-cost care to vulnerable pet families, guided by Kwane’s powerful philosophy, no judgment, just help. Kwane’s compassionate work earned him national recognition when he was named CNN Hero of the Year in 2023. His work is featured in the docu-series, The Street Vet, which brings those stories to life, and he’s the author of the book, What It Takes to Save a Life, which is now being considered for a feature film. Kwane, congratulations on that success. We’re so proud that you’re a Ram.

Kwane Stewart: Thank you. Thank you.

Amy Parsons: You’re back on campus this week to accept the Distinguished Alumni Award from your alma mater. What is it like for you to be back on campus receiving this award?

Kwane Stewart: It’s a little surreal. I’ve only been here once since graduation, 28 years ago, so this is my second, and so much has changed, obviously. And the city looks totally different, but it’s nostalgic. Just walking around the vet hospital was really neat and brings back emotion, and old memories in the cubes, and silly things we used to do. But yeah, the four years was a very special time. And as I tell people, probably four of the best years of my whole life just being here, and the friends, and the relationships, and the endure.

Amy Parsons: Talk a little bit about your journey to get to CSU. You shared a little bit about it last night. What sparked your early career in getting into veterinary medicine, and then, how you found your way to CSU specifically?

Kwane Stewart: I thought from the age of seven, apparently I told my mother I was going to be an animal doctor. I didn’t know what a vet was, but I had walked out of the movie, The Black Stallion, and was just so enthralled with this majestic black horse and the relationship with the boy, and she said I walked out of the movie and was looking up and said, “I’m going to be an animal doctor one day,” and that was the beginning. And I took a strong interest in school, and science, and all those things naturally, because sometimes it’s hard to push your kids to do that. I was reading textbooks, and so, from a very early age, I kind of knew where I was headed, but I don’t think you quite understand how much work it does take to actually get into vet school. It’s so competitive, as you know, and Colorado State being ranked in top three for decades now.

Kwane Stewart: And so, I remember having this very arrogant moment after, as I was applying. So, towards the end of undergrad, I was talking to my dad and I said, “Yeah, I’m going to…” My dad was an NFL player, and I had this dream I was going to just run off. I never played football in high school. I was just going to run off. I ran track. I was fast. I’m tall, and I thought, yeah, I’m just going to… I almost was like, I don’t want to say hoping I didn’t get accepted, but I knew if I didn’t, I was like, “I’m going to go be an NFL player.” So, I said to my dad, “I’m going to apply to one school one year, and if I don’t get in, that’s it.” Which nobody does, by the way, these days.

Amy Parsons: Yeah, no.

Kwane Stewart: You apply to like 10 schools. You hedge your bets, and maybe you get in. If not… There were people in my class that had applied for six, seven years before finally getting in.

Amy Parsons: Wow.

Kwane Stewart: So, yeah, as the story goes, I applied to CSU that one year, and I was on the alternate list, and it was within a few weeks of class starting, I was like, all right, “I’m going to be a washed up NFL player one day.” And then I got called up and here I am, and the rest was history.

Amy Parsons: Here you are back here receiving the Distinguished Alumni Award.

Kwane Stewart: I know.

Amy Parsons: You also shared something last night, really interesting about the DVM license and how diverse it is, what you can do with that. That’s a bit counterintuitive. So, talk a little bit about that, the license itself and how diverse it is and how that’s played a role in all the different things that you’ve done with it.

Kwane Stewart: The one, I think it really is really the only thing that I remember from commencement as far as speeches go was one of my professors, and I don’t remember which one, he just said, “You are now granted the most diverse professional license in the world,” and that’s all he said. And again, at the time, you don’t really understand fully what that means, and you walk out in the world, you start doing these things. But yeah, and then, I joked last night, I said, “If I had been sitting with a classmate in the ’90s…” If you could take me today and blast me to the past, and I was sitting there talking with my old friends from the ’90s and I said, “Yeah, one day, I’m going to be the head vet of Netflix.” They, they’re like, “What the… What’s a Netflix?”

Amy Parsons: Yeah, exactly.

Kwane Stewart: And I would’ve said, “Well, it’s this streaming… Nevermind. You’ll see in about 20 years.” Like a Back to the Future moment. But I mean, that’s just one area of this industry, this profession of all the different things you can do. And it is so neat. And I’m still, 28 years into it, I’m still exploring things I can do with my license.

Amy Parsons: Let’s talk about the Netflix aspect of what you do a little bit because it’s so fascinating to me. A lot of people see the “No Animals Were Harmed” at the end of shows and TV, but what does that mean? What does your work actually look like?

Kwane Stewart: Yeah, so the “No Animals Were Harmed,” which is sort of like a cultural mantra, it’s part of pop culture. People have used it in commercials and other ways, but it’s a legacy program that started in 1931 after a movie, Jesse James intentionally rode a horse off a cliff to its death for a movie scene for just a quick shot. The cowboy bailed, the horse rode off the cliff, and there was some outrage in Hollywood, rightfully so. And American Humane launched this No Animals Were Harmed program. So, it’s been around for a very long time, and it just advocates for the safety and welfare of these working animals, these animal actors, as we call them, on movie sets.

Amy Parsons: So, when you’re on a movie set, you’re working directly with the animals or you’re giving advice on how to work with the animals?

Kwane Stewart: A little bit. Yeah, a little bit of both. I’m not giving direct veterinary care, so I’m not there in the capacity to care for an injured animal. I’m there to advise on what to do, what not to do. You have to think these directors, they’re creative people. They have these wild visions of… I was on War Horse of like, “I want to jump this horse over two train carts,” and you just, “Look buddy. Spielberg, look, you can’t do that.” You just have to bring them back to reality a little bit. But there is this really cool intersection between the creative and the safety, and then, being able to see a live animal do its thing in a film, so long as you know they were safe and treated well.

Amy Parsons: Yeah, so I mean you’ve developed such a large following, social media following, people following your work. I’ve been following it since I knew that you were a CSU alum and coming here. It’s so inspiring to people, how you work with animals, the trust that you gain with both the owners and the animals themselves in day to day. Talk a little bit about that. It’s such a gift. I can tell when we watch you working with animals and with people, especially with your work with Project Street Vet. How do you just approach those situations with animals you’ve never met before, people you’ve never met before, to establish that kind of trust and rapport quickly in both areas of your work?

Kwane Stewart: Yeah. Well, here’s the amazing thing I think about being a vet and being a stranger to somebody who has a pet, a very beloved pet, is if… I’ll give a very brief visual. I’m on the streets, I’m walking, I carry my backpack full of medical goods, I’m walking through the streets of Skid Row, and I turn a corner, and there’s someone living behind a dumpster in the most literal sense. They may have a tarp, they may or may not have a sleeping bag, but they live there. And some of these people have lived in the same spot for years in Skid Row.

They don’t know who I am or what my intention is. And so, usually from afar, I just say, “I’m Kwane Stewart. I’m a vet, and I just walk the area and I give free veterinary care to anyone who’s in need, has a pet.” And 98% of the time, they just sort of nod or say, “That’s great,” or, “Thank you,” or they just kick the door open, and I just get to work. I take out my stethoscope, and I start listening to the heart, and I do my full exam. And you’re right, within minutes, there is this trusting bridge that develops out of nowhere. It just materializes because they see who I am. They know I’m there for the right reasons, and there is this trust. And then, usually within minutes, they’re sharing something usually very personal. And so, I have been on a street corner under a traffic lamp, which becomes my office all of a sudden, for an hour sometimes, with somebody I just met as they’re telling me about their life or I’m sharing moments about my life or why I do this. These are really special, intimate experiences.

Amy Parsons: Let’s go down that road a bit about why you do this. What drew you to this work in the first place as a vet?

Kwane Stewart: I often say it really found me. So, I’ll take you back to 2007. So, I was about 10 years out of school, and the day I left here, I packed up my old junky Mustang, my 5.0, and I drove straight to San Diego without a job, and that was the start. I grew up in New Mexico, Albuquerque, very much like Denver or Fort Collins in some respects, and I just wanted be near water, on the coast. So, I drove out there. I got a job, and I was 10 years into work and loving it. I was in San Diego, I mean, the beach, and you could smell the ocean air.

And then, I decided to take a job as a shelter vet. I don’t know why. I wanted a new challenge, and it was a municipality in central California. Modesto was a central city. And it was during the recession, and people were dropping off… It was just hordes of animals coming in, and you couldn’t keep up. And we were euthanizing, sadly, some mornings by 10 A.M., 50 cats and dogs. This was a reality for me and my staff for years.

Amy Parsons: Wow.

Kwane Stewart: And it started to break me. And I recall about three years into the job, I was just going to quit. And I wasn’t just going to quit the shelter as their chief vet. I felt like walking away from vet medicine because it was so heart-wrenching, and it was starting to sort of steal a part of my soul. I was sitting outside of 7-Eleven, and I was rehearsing what I was going to tell the director that morning as I resigned. I walked in 7-Eleven sort of stone-faced, and I walked out with my coffee, was my pattern, my morning pattern. And to my left, outside the storefront, as you’ll sometimes see, was an unhoused man and his dog. And I turned to my left.

And as a vet for now 10 years, you start diagnosing stuff from across a freeway. This dog has flea allergic dermatitis, which this dog had. It was just a flea problem, a chronic flea problem. But when dogs have fleas long enough, and some people may know this, without treatment, it looks really bad. This dog looked like a burn victim on its hind end just from fleas. So, I stepped over, introduced myself, and he was just desperate for help. And I said, “If you’re here tomorrow, I’ll return with something that’ll help.” So, that took me back to the shelter one more day. I did not quit, and I returned with a $3 flea treatment and five more minutes of my time. And I treated the dog.

And then, I saw the same dog about a week and a half later, same man, and sitting in the same spot. And the dog was transformed already after just 12 days. She was bouncing around. Before, she was despondent, curled up in the corner. Now, she was moving around. And I took a knee, and the man looked at me with tears in his eyes, and he said, “Thank you for not ignoring me.”

Amy Parsons: And Project Street Vet was born from that moment.

Kwane Stewart: That was the day that Street Vet was born. And I looked back at him and I just said, “I’m going to find more people like you.” I just made him a quiet pledge that I was going to start walking the streets and find more people like him. And I did. I ended up staying at the shelter for two more years, inspired so much by that one moment. And in that two years, we took our shelter, which is one of the worst in the nation with respect to euthanasia and made us one of the better shelters in the country in a matter of two years. I was just renewed, and we started a number of programs and adoption rates tripled. Euthanasia rate was cut in half, and after five years to the day, five years to the day, I walked from the shelter, and then, I moved on to this. And I’ve been walking the streets for 14 years.

Amy Parsons: 14 years. So, what does the operation look like today?

Kwane Stewart: We are in six cities now.

Amy Parsons: Wow.

Kwane Stewart: And what was just once me schlepping the streets by myself has turned into roughly 15 veterinarians and maybe 40 assistants or technicians. And the best part is everybody volunteers their time. I volunteer my time. All my vets volunteer their time. So, at a time when it’s just impossible to even hire a vet for pay, vets can go anywhere and work anywhere for just about anything. They’re so needed. There’s such a shortage. They come, they reach out to me and say, “I want to do what you do,” and I’m happy to volunteer. So, we do it for passion, not for pay as we like to say. And it’s inspiring all the way around, but for that reason, obviously, it’s very special.

Amy Parsons: It’s really inspiring. Kwane, what have you learned about the unhoused population through this work through the years that you wish maybe more people understood about their situations?

Kwane Stewart: We make a lot of assumptions about the homeless, and I did too, if I’m being honest. There was a time I would drive… I spent a lot of time in LA. And you see an able-bodied man shaking a can at a corner, and your first thought is like, get a job. You can work. That thought has run through everybody’s head if you’re being honest with yourself. But the truth is, when you get to know a lot of these people, you don’t know what they’ve been through. Broken homes, foster care, abusive parents, never had the opportunity to go to school or get an education. You just don’t know the trauma they’ve experienced. So, for me to sit there and make assumptions and write their story for them, as I like to say, that is completely unfair. So, that’s one on the person side.

On the pet side, as I tell people, I don’t think I’ve seen better pet parents in my 28 years than I do with them on the streets. Now, they’re short on resources, to be fair, but the relationship, the bond is on a level that I don’t see in normal clinical practice. When they’re willing to sacrifice a warm bed and a shower because the housing will not accept their dog or they pass up on their only meal of the day to feed their dog, I don’t know that I would do that. Maybe, but I haven’t been there. But when you see them do this day after day after day, then you develop a very different perspective on what real responsibility to a pet looks like.

Amy Parsons: That’s fascinating. I mean, you see the pets on the street and you want to help them. What is the best way for people like me who are not in the industry, can help your work, can help Project Street Vet, can help with this vet care because it’s people care as well, right?

Kwane Stewart: Yeah. Well, it’s always people care indirectly because these pets are a lifeline for a lot of these people. It’s all they have in life. So, you can always donate to Project Street Vet and go to the website, and that’s pretty simple. We take volunteers in the six cities we are in. And the map, the heat map will show that on the website. And I’ve been asked this question a lot, and I’ve given it a lot of thought over the years. If you’re just sitting at home and you want to do something locally, right there in your own neighborhood with your own vet, what could you do? So, I’ve suggested that people go to their vet and ask him or her, “Would you mind sponsoring a pro bono case for someone who’s unhoused or really economically challenged, and I’ll pitch in? Or I’ll pay for two cases a year.” Whatever you could do financially. Maybe it’s just one.

Amy Parsons: That’s a great idea.

Kwane Stewart: Yeah. Just if everyone who was a little more comfortable than the next person went in and suggested that to your vet, they’re running small businesses too, so that’s obviously their barrier. But say, “I’ll cover one person a year,” and we had a lot of people doing that within… A lot more pets would see care.

Amy Parsons: That’s a great idea. That’s a great idea. What you’re doing is so inspiring. I’ve been watching you on social media, and your Instagram, and the videos, and just the way you walk up and approach people, the impact that you make. One by one, dog by dog, person by person, it’s incredible. And I know that you’re here speaking to our students today. You’re speaking to our veterinary medicine students and other students who are potentially interested in going to vet school someday. What do you think are the most important skills for our students to be learning today while they’re in college, while they’re in vet school, so that they can do what you do in the future of being confident of being out there, establishing that trust, really making an impact in unique ways?

Kwane Stewart: If I could take my… Again, go back 28 years and make sure I took something with me into my veterinary career earlier, sooner rather than later, it would be to remember why I wanted to be a vet in the first place. You know what happens? The moment you step out of school, you’re like, “I’m done.” So, that old junky Mustang I mentioned, I went out and got a brand new Cobra Mustang like two months later, the one in the showroom spinning. I could not afford the fricking thing. I had stars in my eyes. I knew that’s what I’m going to buy. So, you want to go out and get yourself a few toys. You’ve worked so hard to get there.

And then, everything becomes transactional. Suddenly, it’s like rent and bills, and I have this new car payment, and I’m working, and I’m really understanding what it means to see a client. I don’t own the practice. Make sure the estimate’s complete, charge the person. So, the world just suddenly becomes, again, very transactional, and you get a little lost in that and forget… I forget the moment when I was in college and my dog got hit by a car, and I could not afford it. Broken leg, required a bone plate. It was $750 in 1992, which was a lot of money. And without help, my dog would’ve been euthanized. I think we start to forget…

Vet students, I think, are built different than most care providers. There is always this child… There is this child voice that speaks to you about, “We’re here for the right reasons. You love animals. This is why you’re doing it. It’s not about the money.” You poll most the vet students, they’d all probably tell you something very similar. But you get in the world, and you forget that. So, if you could be reminded of that when you’re talking to someone, then you’re still seeing the person, you’re seeing the pet, and you’re not seeing a paycheck. And I will be sure to remind our students of that as they push out.

Amy Parsons: And your story is so powerful about when you reach that point of burnout, you were worried you’re going to go in and maybe leave the professional altogether. I’m sure that’s a common experience for veterinarians, depending on their path and where they’re working. So, I think helping them to understand coming back to what they love and the impact that they’re making, it’s an important story.

Kwane Stewart: Very much.

Amy Parsons: So, thanks for being here today and sharing your story with our students and being such an inspiration. As we wrap up, what is next for you? You’ve published a book. It’s looking at a feature film. Your Project Street Vet is continuing to grow. What’s the future for Kwane?

Kwane Stewart: I don’t know. That’s the cool part. It’s still unwritten. We’ll see what happens with the whole book and the movie. Will Smith was the one who reached out. His team cold emailed me when the book was written and said… They just came out and said it on the Zoom call, “Will has an interest to make another Pursuit of Happiness. And he thinks your-”

Amy Parsons: Oh, wow.

Kwane Stewart: “… story, your book could be it.” So, we wrote the script, and it’s being read. And I don’t know, last year, I started Dog Food Company with John Legend and Chrissy Teigen, and I still do my set work and there’s probably… I’ll be sure to tell my Brad Pitt story with the students today. We don’t have time. I’m sorry. We don’t have time today.

Amy Parsons: Oh, no.

Kwane Stewart: But yeah, the moment I was on set with him, the long short of it is he ignored me. But it was still a cool moment. But I don’t know. Again, going back to what my license can do, if I’m really willing to explore it, we’ll see. I’ll come back and check in with you in a few years and maybe we can talk about it more.

Amy Parsons: Please do. Come back anytime and know that your alma mater, CSU, is just so proud of you. And again, congratulations on your Distinguished Alumni Award.

Kwane Stewart: Thank you.

Amy Parsons: But you’re such an inspiration to us at CSU and the students who are following in your footsteps, and for all of us who just care about humanity and love animals, to see you out there being brave and making an impact day to day, it helps us all get up and make an impact on our own way.

Kwane Stewart: Thank you.

Amy Parsons: So, thank you.

Kwane Stewart: Thank you. This school had a lot to do with that. And I want to be clear to point that out, that again, some of the best years of my life, but what you take from those experiences, they really do serve as a foundation. And when my story is fully written, this university and this education will have a lot to say about that.

Amy Parsons: That’s amazing. Well, thank you.

Kwane Stewart: Thank you. Yeah.

Amy Parsons: Thank you for being here.

Kwane Stewart: Thank you.

Amy Parsons: Go Rams.

Kwane Stewart: Go Rams.

Amy Parsons: Thank you for listening. I’m Amy Parsons, president of Colorado State University, and you are listening to CSU’s The Next 150, where we explore what comes next for CSU by chatting with change-makers who are already leading the charge and shaping our next 150 years. I’m gathering their very best advice for today’s CSU students. Stay tuned to wherever you get podcasts for our next outstanding conversation. Go Rams.