Dr. Arthur L. Daun, Jr. of Waukesha –
WVMA President 1990
Art Daun, Jr., DVM
Photo: Courtesy
from Dr. Art Daun, Jr.
My term as president occurred fairly soon after the
hiring of a full time executive director. Consequently the directors' office
was still finding it's way on many fronts and this necessitated a very hands on
approach from the president. I spent time on the phone every weekday with the
director, Leslie Schoenfeld, and frequently traveled to various
administrative and committee meetings. The committee structure had been
revitalized by my two predecessors but I felt the need to be at most meetings
to fill in the "big" picture. The demands of time and
effort were significant but fruitful.
My term as
president coincided with the 75th anniversary of the WVMA, which was celebrated
at the annual convention. Attendance,
exhibitor participation and quality of CE at the annual meeting had been
gradually deteriorating. Perhaps because
we addressed these issues through the annual meeting committee, work by the
historical committee on the anniversary and hard work at the director's office,
we were able to reverse these trends. The 75th anniversary annual meeting was
a huge success.
Personal
information
I am an army brat. In the early part of my life I
traveled around with my father, who was in
the military, an
officer. We ended up in Madison, IN, where I
graduated high school
in 1967. I went to Purdue University for six
years, where I got my DVM degree in
1973. I became interested in veterinary medicine
when I was about 12 years old and it
just was a natural outflow of the extremely close relationship I had with
my dog and other animals. I had a bit
of knack in the biological sciences and it seemed like the right thing
to do. I went out and found a job with a
veterinarian and pursued that through high school.
I went to Purdue University
because it was the only school in Indiana that had a veterinary school. I have never
regretted by choice.
During his presidency
I started to formulate my major thoughts about my agenda for my
presidency the
year before as, the
president-elect. The Nine-States Veterinary Conference that year was in
Toledo, and I attended with several people from the Wisconsin VMA. My major goals were established during that meeting as
we explored a lot of different avenues of veterinary medicine.
But the two things that I saw that I thought needed
major change.
One was
our legislative program. We had a lobbyist who for many years who basically did very little. We
heard very little from that lobbyist who didn't seem to
be advising us in any concrete way. I
thought that our legislative program needed a
major update. At Nine-States, we asked a lot of questions about expectations for lobbyists. And came back from
that meeting with a very serious plan of
things that lobbyists should be doing
for us and suggesting
to us. We interviewed
lobbyists to find out what they would do for
us. We spent a lot of time and interviewed a
lot of people, and the result of that was hiring of Martin
Schrieber, the
former governor, to represent us.
That was a major change and has really yielded a lot of fruit over the
last few years.
We've
had good representation with our state legislature, and we have been at the forefront
of quite a few different bills that have gone our way, some haven't. All in all, we are a proactive organization,
and we are well respected in the legislature. They know that when the WVMA
wants something, we have a lot of guns out there to push for what we want and
we go about it in a proper and effective manner. They pay attention to us.
The second
item that came out of that Nine-States meeting was that I didn't feel we had significant
forward planning. We let administration after administration come and go and
there was not a very good continuity in terms of following through with plans.
One year isn't enough, in some cases, to get things done. I established what
has turned into an annual retreat for the board members. Essentially, the
entire board met for a full weekend with the object of exploring where we've
been and where we're going. It was not a time to do the daily business of the
association; we do that at regular board meetings. This was meant strictly to
plan. That group even found that they couldn't get enough done in just that
weekend, so, they established an additional forward planning committee which is
comprised of past presidents. This committee makes
recommendations to the board.
Changing lobbyists and the executive
board retreat were high on my list and both came to fruition.
One thing that happened during
my term was the establishment of an Animal Welfare Committee. Dr. Jake Hines
chaired than initial committee. I'm not familiar really with how active that
committee is at this time but, in that time, there were quite a few issues
about animal welfare. Our state association did quite a bit of work in that
area.
Annual meeting
The
other thing, during my term, that I was most interested in doing, was changing
the trend of our annual meeting away from less and less participation. At that
time, we were getting between 200 and 250 total attendees at the annual
meeting. This had been going on for some time. My goal was to double
attendance, and we did double it. That annual meeting was also an anniversary,
the 75th Anniversary of the WVMA. It was held in Lake Geneva; we
had 500 attendees. That was a result not only from a major push by me in
repetitiously writing in the newsletter which, incidentally, I was taken to
task for by a few members, but just in communicating throughout the state as
president-elect, that we needed to do this for our association.
It was important that we start to
support the annual meeting and even if the topics were not particularly
interesting in some cases, that was not the only purpose of the annual meeting.
A major purpose was to transact the annual business of our association. A lot
of people got the message and the Convention Committee put on a great
continuing education event. The Historical Committee had a great display and
some special events. All told, it became a success and people that hadn't been
going, started going, and that trend has continued. It got a jumpstart and that
was fulfilling.
At our
annual meeting, we did have a keynote speaker for openings sessions and that
was Marty Schrieber. He did a nice job and a humorous job, as usual. I presided
at the annual meeting luncheon, and we did not have a featured speaker, just my
speech and then I turned over the gavel.
Challenges
The greatest challenge during my term was,
frankly, just to balance my practice with the demands of the association. As president-elect, I
attended most committee meetings, wherever they were throughout the state. I
put about 5,000 personal miles on my vehicle as president-elect, and then again
as president. I found myself sometimes weekly, sometimes two and three times a
week, leaving practice at the end of the day and driving to Madison or Juneau
or wherever and attending a committee meeting and getting back in the wee hours
and doing it all over again the next day. Every day, during the day, I met with
Leslie on the phone at a quarter to two to discuss whatever business might have
come up that we needed to address. It was time-consuming. It took a couple
hours a day.
That kind
of time commitment started a few years previously when committees which seemed
to slip a little bit were rejuvenated. Larry Mahr was probably the kingpin in
getting committees going, Bill Hilleman and Larry Mahr started rejuvenating
committees and they became quite active. The committees needed somebody that
knew what was going on in all the committees, so they weren’t all the same
ground. That’s why I felt it was important to be at almost all committee
meetings, to help tie the thing together. That was probably the most difficult
thing, not to mention travelling to Nine-States meetings. AVMA-sponsored
meeting in Chicago, to that national meeting, and all those kinds of things. It
just took a lot of time away from practice.
Legislative issues
One of the major items at that time was a
sales tax bill in which certain legislators saw veterinary medicine as an
opportunity to garner some more income. We successfully fought that through our
association and Marty Schreiber and our Legislative Committee.
Another
major concern had to do with pesticide laws in which the Department of Agriculture
wanted to asses some fees against veterinarians to be able to use and apply
pesticides. Although we were not totally successful at combating their efforts,
we were a double licensure. Financially, we were able to save the veterinarians
major money.
An ongoing concern, one which I had been
working very hard on, even for several years after my presidency, had to do
with attempts to get the Department of Agriculture to upgrade our state
laboratory. That was a very time-consuming project for me and a lot of other
people and, unfortunately, I don’t think we’ve ever been able to get the kind of
laboratory we feel Wisconsin deserves. The majority of testing now in this
state is being done by outside laboratories. Our state laboratory does well over
50 percent of their business with just the artificial insemination people in
the bovine business. Most small animal practitioners do the vast majority of
their laboratory work elsewhere, which may not be all bad. Our state laboratory
is still not a front runner if you compare it to a lot of other state labs like
Cornell and Texas, where they do wonderful jobs.
National
veterinary issues
I do remember one interesting scenario where
there was going to be a discussion at the national meeting about using leg hold
traps. And we discussed it at one of our state board meeting and decided that
it would be proper for veterinarians to object to the continued use of leg hold
traps. We thinking along the lines of procuring furs for people to wear, and we
were pretty sure that there were other things people could wear to keep warm
where they didn’t have to torture animals to obtain furs. We went to national
meeting with that being our standpoint, where we started listening to some
speakers from around the country in committees that were discussing this. For
instance, the California sheep-raising people showed us that out there, if you
couldn’t kill, but actually rip open the abdomens of the young lambs and eat
the curdled milk out of their stomachs. They couldn’t use poison, that bad been
outlawed. They found that shooting was totally ineffective. The coyotes got to
wise to quickly to be shot. The only thing that really worked was leg hold
traps. We hadn’t considered that; we were thinking entirely in terms of furs.
Another
group from the Department of Agriculture in Maryland presented some
information. They were trying to preserve some endangered species in a wildlife
area and the only way they could do it was to control predators and the only
way they found to control to do certain things. Since then, I think it’s been
thought through a little bit more and, in some instances using leg hold traps
is the only way to get something done that might be considered desirable. There
are padded traps, and there are other ways of doing it more humanely than it
use to be done. But, just the altruistic “no leg hold traps” didn’t hold up
very well. We realized that it was a lot broader subject that we thought.
WVMA Executive Board
The
board met during my term five times a year plus the board retreat. We met all
over the state. We probably had more meetings in the Madison area than anywhere
else, but we also had meetings in central Wisconsin, northern Wisconsin, and
eastern Wisconsin. Those meeting places were established, trying to make it
fair for people from all over the state, so that no individual had to drive the
farthest each time.
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