Giving Stories

“Grammar was a very special being. She was independent, yet loving. She was cool and tough, but still let me put pink collars on her,” Grammar’s owner recalls. “She did not suffer fools – but also had a great love for other dogs.”

Grammar, a white husky mix, was one of two puppies found in the woods in southern United States in 2010. She and her puppy mate were starving, weak, and desperately in need of care. Grammar’s owner adopted her without hesitation.

When Ron and Kathleen Spicer first crossed paths as rodeo competitors in the 1960s, they were drawn to each other by a shared passion for animals and an interest in their health and welfare. Their backgrounds—Ron hailed from a farm in Minnesota, where as a young man, he was a sought-after horse trainer, while Kathleen grew up on a cattle ranch in western North Dakota—fostered a love for animals that came to define their lives together. The self-described “cowboy and cowgirl from the Midwest” inspired many with their devotion to horses, dogs and other animals.

Thanks to UC Davis, my 9-year-old Miniature Pinscher Terrier Reesie is alive and doing well. She had a difficult health journey for a while. In December 2023, she developed a respiratory infection. Then a month later, when she started to limp, we discovered that she had a mass on her right forearm. Our local veterinarian thought it may be a sarcoma, so we started to make a plan to resolve the mass. And then, suddenly, Reesie started to have seizures.

Handsome is not your typical ten-year-old Doberman pinscher. Not only does he have a very strong vocabulary (his owner Judith Friedman said he can be very demonstrative when he needs something), he is also the first participant in a clinical trial through the UC Davis Veterinary Center for Clinical Trials (VCCT) that has the promise of treating metastatic cancer in dogs.

Lin Zucconi’s dedication to animals started at an early age. She loved her sister’s cat and had turtles of her own. Her dedication to them earned her the nickname in her neighborhood as the “turtle doctor.” When she went away to college at the University of California, Berkeley, she ensured the turtles had a home at the Oakland Zoo. As she moved into adulthood, she stayed dedicated to animals, especially cats. 

“We were interested in exploring pilot project ideas that could be proposed for Center-scale research and received these unrestricted funds at the exact time we needed them,” said Christine Kreuder Johnson, VMD, MPVM, Ph.D., a professor of epidemiology and ecosystem health in the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.