When Dr. Lexi Rudd bought Valley Animal Hospital in March, she knew it wasn’t going to be easy. She’d never owned a business before and the hospital had been through some difficult times with the illness and eventual death of its beloved former owner, Dr. Eric Westheimer.

“They don’t teach you how to run a business” in vet school, said Rudd, who graduated from the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.

But she plunged in and made it her own.

She painted, knocked out a wall, rearranged the office, brought in new lab equipment and updated her two exam rooms.

The result is a warm, friendly space that feels rejuvenated.

Her next test? Clients.

Westheimer was a revered veterinarian who had intensely loyal clients who came from as far as New Mexico.

“I’ve never met a single person who didn’t love him as a doctor and a person,” Rudd said.
But the year Westheimer was away while fighting the brain tumor than ultimately claimed him was hard on everybody. With a string of relief vets or, sometimes, no vet on duty at all, the hospital suffered. Clients were leery, not sure what to expect.

But they came back. Some cautiously.

“A lot of people have made appointments just to meet me,” Rudd said. “Even with a totally healthy animal.

“That is a person who really cares about their pet.”

It turns out the practice was exactly what the doctor ordered.

Before coming to Goleta Rudd worked for three years at CARE Hospital in Santa Barbara, which specializes in emergency pet care.

It’s good medicine, she said, but the nature of the work is “fix ’em and get ’em out as fast as you can.” You can save a dog’s life in surgery and then never see it again.

The hospital, though, gives her the chance to see a case through, to get to know her patients and their owners.

“It’s nice to be the kind of vet who can spend 45 minutes with people,” she said. “I think I’m more attuned to this type of a practice.”

Maybe she was meant to be here. A few years ago a client gave Westheimer a painting she did in gratitude for his work with her animals. It’s a lovely rendering of a dog looking out the passenger window of a green 1950 Chevy pickup.

When Rudd arrived to see the hospital the first time and to meet Westheimer’s wife, Karen, and son Cody, she drove up in her own green ’50 Chevy pickup.

“It seemed like they knew that that tied it all together,” she said.

Then things moved fast.

She made an offer on the hospital within a week, and on March 2 she signed the papers and “pretty much gave away everything I had to my name and started working.”

Today she has three employees, a pair of experienced vet technicians, Molly Minnis and Charlotte Tussler, and her receptionist and jack of all trades, Kimi White.

She treats just about anything — dogs, cats, birds, reptiles — and even had a hedgehog in the hospital recently.

She’s also a Certified Veterinary Acupuncturist, and uses the ancient art in conjunction with traditional medicine to treat pain, especially for chronic arthritis.

Rudd has plans for more improvements and hopes to hire another technician. In the meantime the practice is busy and life is good.

“Veterinarians here are really lucky,” she said. “Goleta’s a very special place. People here have a very special relationship with their pets.”

Valley Animal Hospital is at 102 S. Fairview Ave., between El Sitio and McDonald’s. Call 964-7755.

Strictly Local is a weekly profile of a Goleta Valley-based business. To suggest a business, callmanaging editor Jim Logan at 681-5905, or e-mail him at jlogan@goletavalleyvoice.com.

Photo by Jim Logan