Monica LaSalle, Nederland. With a quiet, gentle unassuming way, Dani Dillon has painstakingly worked hard to not only establish herself as a leading professional in her field but to give back to her community with the love, attention and compassion that a down-home veterinarian gives when she has lived her life dedicated to others.
Having been called to work with animals from early childhood, she seems to have a natural instinct and connection that borders on the mystical. As I walk into her new vet hospital, she greets me with her German Sheppard, Yankee, who is resisting the urge to follow her son Gavin around the building to make sure he is safe at all times. As Dani patiently redirects Yankee to her side and sooths him with soft words and gentle pats, I gaze around the office and see not just the usual pet supplies but pictures of all kinds of beloved pets and a general, all around animal-friendly environment. Staff members all seem to be holding a dog or working with one as I am guided through to the back lounge past high tech diagnostic equipment of one kind or another, all meant to assist technicians in getting to the bottom of nearly any health problem brought in to their hospital.
There is an air of love and devotion filling the atmosphere as we settle in to the back breakroom, and Dani points out a large magnet attached to the staff refrigerator that says, “Nederland Veterinary Hospital – serving Large and Small animals.” She tells me that when she first arrived in Nederland from a farm community in Vermont, the magnet was on the door of a vet truck that would travel around serving all kinds of large animals wherever the need would arise.
Growing up on a farm, Dani was exposed to animals from the moment she was born because her mother showed and bred both dogs and horses. Dani chuckles as she tells me that at the age of 5, she performed her first showing through the 4H program she was enrolled in with a dairy goat. Not much later she began attending dog handling classes with her mother who had started breeding dogs for show. It didn’t take many classes for Dani to ask her mother if she could give it a shot, and a star was born.
She performed her first dog showing at age 7 and began a career of “finishing” other people’s dogs in Montreal, Canada with great success. Later on, Dani became a Jr. Showman, competing in Westminster and Canada, where she won Best Jr. Handler for at first the province of Quebec and later the whole of Canada. She earned this distinction 3 years in a row before she stopped competing to apprentice with adult professional handlers, traveling up and down the eastern seaboard in an RV with as many as 10 to 15 dogs, all in crates in the gutted interior which was custom designed to take them to shows.
Dani eventually left home for good, attending university at Champlain College, in Burlington, and later at CU Boulder. She worked showing dogs for herself on weekends and grooming at a pet boutique in Burlington before visiting a college friend that had moved to Colorado. I asked her if she had come with the intention of gaining access to the show world of the Front Range and she says, not at all. With a grin, she tells me a story of her visit, describing how she and a friend spent 2 weeks camping in Rocky Mountain National Park, where one morning she awoke to elk all around their tent. Since she couldn’t find her glasses, she thought they were cows until she got them into focus. It was that experience of waking to wildlife all around her each morning that caused Dani to fall in love with the area.
Much to the dismay of friends and family, she put her 3-week notice in to any and all commitments she had in Vermont when she arrived. She packed her Doberman, Ciji, and kitten, Solomon, and headed out to Boulder, where she spent 5 years working for a coffee company to get to know the locals and switching gears to show horses around the Front Range for different trainers. The schedule was much different than showing dogs, with it taking two weeks at a time to attend one showing rather than just weekends. A larger, more expensive affair, Dani says she switched because she wanted to get to know more people. Letting fate guide her way, she tells me how she opened a phone book to the yellow pages one day, looking up equestrian farms and randomly poking her finger down on a farm. She calls the first number which happens to be Bell Park Arabians, a nice coincidence considering her mother specialized in the Arabian breed.
Dani spent the next few years caring for and exercising horses out on 36 and Nelson for Betty Bell, a woman who, due to her advanced age, was no longer able to work with them herself and would walk around with a brash demeanor and a Hardy’s cup full of vodka that she referred to as her “juice.” Dani says she always got along well with the woman, where others struggled, and she enjoyed the experience.
Working there enabled her to afford to buy her own ranch in 1996, a chunk of land down in Coal Creek that was home to the eight horses, 2 Jack Russell’s, 1 German Sheppard and multiple cats she had acquired along the way. Subsequently, she was in the vet’s office a lot, and it was Doc Joe who asked her to volunteer and eventually work for him in the office she was in and out of for many years before she eventually made good on negotiations with Joe to buy him out when he retired.
In the interim, she attended CU for a business degree at first but switched to molecular biology, as it is a requirement for Veterinary School. Her training path happily changed gears when she got pregnant and gave birth to her son, Gavin, and she settled into family life. Despite moving back to Vermont for a few years with her family, she returned to the area and has remained ever since. With steely-eyed determination, Dani is a dedicated member of our mountain community, and even more dedicated to the animal community among us, whether wild or domesticated.
(Originally published in the May 2, 2019, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)
