Donald Hoenig, V’78: One Health, One Career, One Force for Good

A day or two before Thanksgiving 2025, Don Hoenig, V’78, flew to Raleigh, North Carolina, for a meeting with two turkeys. and a veterinarian from Butterball. His special assignment on behalf of the American Humane Society was to examine Gobble and Waddle, the birds selected for the annual presidential pardon.

THey two loaded the turkeys into a van, drove to Washington D.C., and checked the birds into the Willard InterContinental Hotel. Hoenig then skipped the White House pardon, leaving town in time to spend the holiday with his family back home in Maine.

The trip captures the essence of Hoenig’s 45-year career focused on public policy, animal welfare, and clinical care—most of it behind the scenes, without fanfare, and highly influential.

Penn Vet memories and apple pie

Hoenig arrived at Penn Vet in the mid-1970s, newly married and commuting daily from South Jersey. A Bowdoin College graduate, he came with a singular purpose.

“I wasn’t looking to be at the top of the class. I wanted to learn, do well, and start working.”

Nevertheless, Penn Vet made an impact, particularly through its clinical excellence and world-class faculty who shaped how he approaches veterinary medicine.

“It was pretty demanding,” Hoenig said. “We were expected to know our material, think through problems, and take responsibility for the animals in front of us.”

Along with the rigor, two things, in particular, stuck with him.

The first was pie.

“Large animal professor Billy Boucher [William Boucher, V’40] and his wife, Doris, opened their home to students every Tuesday evening for dessert,” he recalled. “Doris’s apple pies were legendary, and I still use the recipe. The key is more sugar than you think, more apples than you expect, and a mix of apple types.”

The second was a former patient.

On St. Patrick’s Day of Hoenig’s final year, a Golden Retriever was dropped at Ryan Hospital’s trauma service after being hit by a car. Orthopedic surgeon Gail K. Smith, VMD, PhD, pinned the dog’s fractured humerus, with Hoenig assisting.

“He arrived with no collar and no one to claim him,” Hoenig said. “So, we adopted him and named him Patrick for the day he came into our lives. He was the best dog we’ve ever had — our loyal buddy for eleven years.”

Consequential influence and the Salmonella King

After graduating in 1978, Hoenig had three job offers and chose a mixed-animal practice on Martha’s Vineyard. Two and a half years later, drawn by the prospect of field work and a growing family, he joined the USDA as a field veterinarian covering New England. (It was there that he encountered Jane Hinton, V’49, who trained him on inspecting research facilities across Boston and Eastern Massachusetts. Read the story here.) By 1983, he and his wife Lynn had settled in Belfast, Maine.

Preferring hands-on work to the federal administration track, he left five years later to become Maine’s state veterinarian, overseeing the health and welfare of the state’s entire animal population.

“I realized I could exert a leadership role. Especially as a state veterinarian—there are only 50 of us, and we have an outsized voice in animal and public health policy in the U.S.”

Through this platform and his relationships with Maine’s congressional delegation, he advocated for the National Veterinary Medical Services Act of 2003, which established the Veterinary Medicine Loan Repayment Program. The program—now administered by USDA’s National Institute for Food and Agriculture—provides $25,000 annually for three years to veterinarians who commit to practicing in designated shortage areas. “This support often can make the difference between rural communities having veterinary service or not,” he said.

Around 2002, Hoenig also took on an additional role as Maine’s de facto public health veterinarian, working alongside the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention on zoonotic outbreaks like avian influenza, Lyme disease, rabies, and West Nile virus. Most years, he logged more than 35,000 miles visiting farms, mostly administering assistance to dairy farms experiencing mastitis or milk quality problems. “It was very practical work,” he said. “If a farmer had a problem, I went out and tried to solve it.”

Some of Hoenig’s most consequential work during this time unfolded around Maine’s egg industry.

Beginning in the late 1980s, the state faced recurring Salmonella outbreaks linked to a strain that had already caused deaths in New York nursing homes.  

Over the next several years, Hoenig helped modernize disease prevention across the state’s industry through hen vaccination, environmental testing, sanitation requirements, and regular inspections. 

In 2010, when the largest Salmonella-related egg recall in U.S. history was traced to Iowa farms owned by Austin “Jack” DeCoster— once nicknamed the “Salmonella King”—Maine’s earlier response was thrust onto the national stage. Under Hoenig, the state had already imposed strict requirements on egg production, and DeCoster’s Maine farms had achieved sustained clean test results for the outbreak strain—turning Maine’s approach into a national benchmark.

“The health of animals and the health of people are inseparable,” Hoenig said. “What happens on farms doesn’t stay on farms. This case drove the point.”

A front seat to a policymaking’s slow roll

In 2012, an American Veterinary Medical Association Congressional Fellowship brought Hoenig to Senator Susan Collins’s office, where he worked on agriculture policy, food safety, and antimicrobial resistance.

“She’s a force,” he said. “I’m a Democrat, and she accepted me—we did some meaningful work.” They focused on issues that crossed the aisle, including the Agriculture Reform, Food, and Jobs Act of 2013 (the “Farm Bill”) and antimicrobial resistance programs. “It gave me a front row seat to how things move—or don’t move—through the committee process.”

When his fellowship ended in 2013, he left D.C., finding it wasn’t for him. “The pace was intense,” he said. “I was living away from home and wanted to get back to the kind of work I’d always loved—out in the field, solving on-the-ground problems.”

During this time, he joined American Humane as senior veterinarian advisor for its Humane Heartland™ program (now American Humane Certified™), a voluntary, third-party audited farm animal welfare program whose science-based animal welfare standards provide higher welfare on farms nationwide. He would advise for six years.

Hoenig’s work expanded internationally when the World Organisation for Animal Health recruited him for its Veterinary Legislation Support Program. Hoenig traveled to Tanzania, the Gambia, and Ghana to help the governments identify gaps and weaknesses in their veterinary legislation. “If the legal structure isn’t there, it’s very hard for a country to respond effectively when disease shows up,” he said. 

Balancing a full life

Today, Hoenig consults on a range of issues spanning public health, food safety, animal welfare, and agricultural policy. After 14 years away from the Maine Department of Agriculture, he has recently begun part-time consulting for the department. He also chairs the state’s Board of Veterinary Medicine.

At home in Belfast, he balances all of these responsibilities with a passion for family, food, travel, running, and writing. He’s run three New York City Marathons with his daughters.

Last summer, he and Lynn took their three children and spouses and eight grandchildren to Umbria for 10 days—the “trip of a lifetime.”

Lynn, newly retired after 32 years teaching elementary school, plays in a steel drum band that performs throughout Maine. Hoenig follows along.

And the couple’s puppy, Todi, keeps things exciting.

Hoenig watches the veterinary profession evolve with mixed feelings. The growing focus on One Health—the idea that human, animal, and environmental health are linked—encourages him, no surprise, given that he helped drive the concept long before it was formalized. At the same time, corporate consolidation is concerning, as is the proliferation of new veterinary schools. “I worry about what that means for the quality of education,” he said.

Still, he believes the profession is moving forward in many ways.

“For years, we accepted certain agricultural practices because they were efficient and profitable, but we often didn’t put the animals first. People started asking good, hard questions, and that pressure has changed the industry. Farmers, veterinarians, and consumers are demanding more humane practices. We’re not all the way there, but we’re becoming better stewards of animal wellbeing than we were a generation ago.”

So next November, should he be called to service, Hoenig will catch a flight to the nation’s capital for the good of the union—and the turkeys. He’ll make sure the birds are healthy, and, by the time cameras roll at the White House, he’ll be gone.