Dake Vet Clinic
Owners: Chuck and Candy Dake
Location: Hwy. 96 Miller, Mo.
Employees: "The clinic has eight employees currently and we're interviewing a lady to possibly come on the staff as another veterinarian."
Company History: "Well my dad had his own ambulatory practice while I was growing up and so I had always wanted to be a vet. When I got done with veterinary school in 1996, I built this clinic and we started this kind of vet work instead, and now dad works for me," Chuck said with a smile. He added, "We bought this five-acre piece of land, which is about three miles from where I grew up, because it's right on 96 highway, only about two miles east of 39 highway, and it's really accessible to the haul-ins that we get regularly."
What facilities does the clinic have? "We have a small animal clinic and a large animal clinic here. The small animal clinic has boarding facilities that can house about 15 to 20 dogs at one time, as long as there are no hospital cases. For the large animal cases we have a haul-in facility that can hold as many as 75 large animals at one time. We primarily house cattle back there."
Products and Services: "We offer small and large animal vet care with grooming and boarding services. We don't do equine surgeries, we refer those out, and we also refer out small animal orthopedic (bone) surgeries. But other than that we'll take care of pretty much any other farm or house animal. We limit our farm calls to about 30 miles from the clinic, but people are welcome to, and often do bring in animals from further than that."
Favorite and least favorite aspects being a veterinarian: "My favorite part of being a vet is the variety of stuff I get to do on a daily basis. Some days I get to go out to the farm and pretend to be a cowboy and the next day I come back here to help fix somebody's house pet. It's a great job. Probably the harder things about the job are working long hours and sometimes having to deal with DEA controls on our medicines and how we store them and keeping track of them. But overall this is really a great job.
