Vet Students Supporting Environmental Health

Are you interested in getting more involved with environmental health and wellness? Read below about what Kaitlyn Denny and her classmates at Michigan State University are doing to help veterinary medicine become a little more environmentally friendly!

Last year, myself and a group of my classmates started the SAVMA Environmental Wellness Committee. I served as a co-founder and the first chair of the committee. Our goal is to help bridge the gap between veterinary medicine and the environmental issues our world is facing. We strive to provide education and tools for CVM students to be responsible stewards of our planet. We hosted various talks and events throughout the semester to encourage sustainability at MSU CVM. We started an initiative of bringing reusable containers for lunch/dinner meetings to decrease waste, brought more recycling bins to the CVM, and hosted speakers about animal agriculture, plastic waste, and the effects of climate change. We also we able to get funding to gift students with bamboo toothbrushes and reusable produce bags. These small items serve as a daily reminder that even the smallest of actions in our daily lives can have profound effects on our environment.The efforts of this committee are vitally important in today's world and I have learned so much from being the inaugural chair.