Couple starts mobile veterinary clinic for the Hi-Line

Three months after moving back to the Hi-Line, Cass and Kent Pattison said they are ready to serve the community.

Cass Pattison earned her veterinary doctorate from Washington State University, and the couple is opening Pattison Veterinary Mobile Clinic while also farming on their family’s land.

“We are here to serve you and offer our services,” Kent Pattison said, adding, “I grew up in Havre and it is really, from my experience, a good community. There have been a lot of people, even to this day, that have helped us through. It would be good to give back and essentially that is what we are here for.”

Cass Pattison said that the mission of the mobile clinic is to provide affordable, convenient pet health care for the Havre community. She said they are offering something different with the clinic, providing services to large and small animals, household pets and cattle. She said she is willing to work with clients’ schedules and drive to wherever they are needed.

They said that they enjoy working with each other.

Kent Pattison said that some people might not enjoy working with their spouse day and night, for them it is perfect.

He said that he grew up in Havre attending and wrestling at Havre High School. He and his wife first met in Great Falls while they were working on their undergraduate degrees at the University of Great Falls, now Providence University, and later got married.

They both lived in Havre after graduating from college, working on his family’s farm. After eight months they moved to Washington so Cass Pattison could attend the College of Veterinary Medicine at Washington State University.

He said they moved back in mid-January this year to work out on the family farm again.

“It was just fun seeing everybody,” he said. “It’s good to be back and see everyone again. You kind of miss it because you grew up on it all the time. You get back out here and you realize, once you get to working with other people, just how hard everybody works. It’s kind of fun to be a part of that.”

Cass Pattison said she first knew she wanted to be a veterinarian when she was six years old, growing up on a dairy farm in Idaho. She said she remembers when the vet would come by her home to perform pregnancy checks on her family’s cattle. She would watch excited at what the vet was doing and ask her dad if she could do it, too.

“I love working with animals, and people and their animals, and educating them,” she said. “I find it really rewarding when you can help something out that can’t speak and tell you what’s wrong. I like challenging cases, kind of being a detective sometimes; I like it.”

Cass Pattison, who graduated from her veterinarian program with a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree, said she finds surgeries fascinating.

“It’s really cool what the body can do and how it can heal,” she said.

At first they were not planning on a mobile clinic, she said. The original plan was for her working mainly out of a pickup truck. But after consideration, he said, they decided there was no reason they couldn’t purchase a cargo trailer and remodel it into a mobile clinic. She added that the idea grew from just wanting to do house calls to making her full operation mobile.

Cass Pattison said she wanted something they could be flexible with, something they could work on while still farming. They also wanted something they could work on together if they needed to.

“I like doing vet work, he likes farming, we like working together,” she said.

Once they got the mobile trailer, she said, it went from zero to 100 quickly.

Kent Pattison said that they started to get their service operational right away, getting help from friends and family along the way.

Cass Pattison said they tried to shop local for the things they could, such as going to Western Trailer to have the heater installed and Frontier Electric to have the outlets and electrical work done.

Kent Pattison said that, in the end, they were able to build it for an eighth of the cost than if they had bought it already set up and were able to complete the project in a single month.

“There were a lot of hands in making this work,” he said.

Cass Pattison said that one thing which was difficult about building the mobile clinic was finding all of the equipment. As a recent graduate, purchasing equipment was a long strenuous process for getting all of the different pieces they needed, especially for anesthesia.

But, in the end, they were able to outfit the trailer with everything a classic brick-and-mortar clinic would, she said, adding that she and her husband worked together to make their logo and had Havreite Michael Marks make the decals for them.

Kent Pattison said they are thankful for all of the help they received with building the mobile clinic.

“We are pretty blessed to be able to get it done in the time we did,” he said.

Cass Pattison said that she is open to doing things with other programs and glad to help out wherever they can, however, she doesn’t want to “step on anyone’s toes.”

She said she will be offering their services across the Hi-Line. She can take her mobile clinic to where the client is, traveling to a house for smaller household pets and farms or ranches to tend to livestock.

Pattison said they have the equipment and gear to work on a wide range of animals. They also provide a variety of services, such as animal wellness, vaccines, surgeries and treating infections.

The only thing they do not have set up is orthopedics, she said, but if they see a demand for it then they will add it.

“We are flexible,” she said. “… We’ll see where the demand takes us.”

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For more information for Pattison Veterinary Mobile Clinic visit https://www.pattisonveterinary.com/.