Adam Bauknecht and teammates show off the San Diego Humane Society’s new 34-foot mobile spay-neuter unit. (Photo courtesy of Adam Bauknecht)
By Jack Kelly
These days, Adam Bauknecht (DVM’09) is spending his time cruising around southern California.
He sometimes makes those drives in the types of cars you expect to see on the road. More recently, he’s been in a 34-foot truck outfitted with a fully functioning operating room set up to perform spay or neuter surgeries on cats and dogs.
Bauknecht works as a shelter outreach veterinarian with the San Diego Humane Society. His current job is the culmination of a 30-year career that, despite having some twists and turns, has always had one throughline: animal shelters.
“There are an awful lot of homeless animals, and I want to do whatever I can to help them as much as possible,” Bauknecht, who believes the SVM’s shelter medicine program was formative in his career, tells On Call.
The Manitowoc, Wisconsin, native started working with animals in need in 1996. After earning an undergraduate degree in animal biology from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, Bauknecht accepted a job at the nearby Bay Area Humane Society. Next up, a move to Madison led to five years working at the Dane County Humane Society.
His job responsibilities prevented him from going back to school for a while, Bauknecht says, as he learned more about shelters and homeless animals. But after nearly a decade of working in the space, he felt like he was at a crossroads.
“At that point, I had hit a ceiling on what I could accomplish in the sheltering world,” Bauknecht says. He knew he needed to go back to school, either to become a veterinarian or to learn about nonprofit management.
When he factored in “the kind of impact that I wanted to have for homeless animals,” it was a no brainer, Bauknecht says, and he headed to vet school.
He started as a student at the School of Veterinary Medicine (SVM) in August 2005 — almost 10 years to the day after he completed his undergraduate degree. During his four years in the DVM program, he continued to work with shelters, volunteering with Dane County Friends of Ferals (now Madison Cat Project). After graduation, Bauknecht had short stints as a surgeon at a high-volume spay-neuter clinic and working in private practice.
But a trip to a veterinary conference reminded him of his love for shelter medicine and why he got into the profession in the first place. When a job opened at the Madison Cat Project, he jumped at the opportunity.
For the next 13 years, Bauknecht performed thousands of spay and neuter surgeries on cats, hoping to help curb the homeless animal population. He also got to give back, working with SVM students and teaching them about the procedures.
(Photo courtesy of Adam Bauknecht)
Flash forward to February 2024, and Bauknecht decided it was time to mix things up again. He wanted to help even more animals in need than the 750–900 that he was seeing each year, so he and his cat, Meowster, made the cross-country move to San Diego.
His current role with the San Diego Humane Society lets him do just that. Working on a three-person team, Bauknecht travels around the San Diego area and southern California to meet with other shelters. They serve as veterinary consultants, making recommendations on how shelters can improve their efficiency and safety protocols when it comes to spay-neuter operations.
Bauknecht and his team are also looking to expand the services into more operational consulting, providing guidance on things like pathway planning, disease and outbreak management, adoption policies, and foster programs.
The 34-foot mobile spay-neuter unit is part of that work. Housing two tables, the operating room on wheels accommodates 20–30 procedures per day. It recently made its inaugural trip to a two-day event in California’s Coachella Valley.
When Bauknecht isn’t on the road, he works closely with the San Diego Humane Society’s surgery department, where he mentors students from Western University, Arizona State, and UC-Davis on their spay-neuter skills.
Spending his time working with students reminds him of his own time in vet school, Bauknecht says. He has fond memories of the “top notch” surgery opportunities afforded to SVM students.
More than 20,000 surgeries later, Bauknecht remains committed as ever to his mission of reducing the number of animals in shelters around the country.
“I’m always excited to do more,” he says. “That tells me that I’m where I want to be, doing what I want to be doing.”