


Deb Glottmann, veterinary technician and founder and president of the Mitzvah Fund, works on a cat. Photo by Will Lindner.
All creatures …
That state of affairs is a far cry from what Connie Riggs envisioned as a child on Long Island, New York, already contemplating a career in animal medicine. Her earliest jobs, as a teenager, were with animal hospitals around her hometown of Huntington. “But I wanted to live like James Herriot — to be a vet in a small town,” she reminisces. (Herriot, a British veterinarian and author, practiced in the Yorkshire Dales. His life and writings were captured in the 1975 movie “All Creatures Great and Small”). “I would rather have been in a barn full of animals than a mall full of teenagers,” she says. After earning her doctorate at Texas A&M University, followed by an internship in small-animal medicine and surgery at the University of Illinois, she moved to Vermont with her family in 1991 and settled in Worcester. Her first job in veterinary medicine came the following year, when she joined the staff of a practice that employed several vets, where she eventually became a part-owner. She left that practice after 10 years, and caught on at a different animal hospital that specialized in alternative medicine. Finally, in 2006, Riggs tried for the Herriot ideal, opening Worcester Veterinary Care in a Yorkshire-like community whose population, by the 2020 census, amounted to 964 people. Like Sisyphus, she pushed that boulder uphill for 10 years before closing the practice, spent and disillusioned, in 2016. “I was trying to be a full-service hospital, like this little M*A*S*H unit trying to provide everything to everybody, out in rural Vermont,” she recalls, “and it’s not possible to live that kind of model in the twenty-first century.” But all was not for naught in those Worcester years. For she had teamed up with Glottmann, who also saw her ideal in what Riggs was trying to capture at the Worcester clinic. Their dedication to animals and people, more even than to their livelihood, became the petri dish for the Mitzvah Fund. “When we had the Worcester practice,” Glottmann says, “we had some really great clients who always wanted to donate to help us help others. It started with a couple of good people bringing us strays, or other people’s animals who couldn’t afford lab work or [veterinary care]. We were trying to do things differently — to be less expensive but also make a living. It’s a balance Connie and I struggle with a lot.” They began taking donations. Sometimes people were galvanized by a particular incident, as when a local dog got hit by a car and needed extensive care. “We had everything from people dropping off a couple dollars to little kids dropping off a quarter,” Glottmann recounts. “Somebody slipped a thousand dollars under our door — in cash!” In 2012 Glottmann formalized this sharing of resources by incorporating the Mitzvah Fund, a 501(c)(3) named in memory of her father, Saul Glottmann’s, life lesson for his children: that people should go out of their way to care for one another. Deb and Connie Riggs merely expanded upon Saul’s definition of “people” to include our furred and feathered companions.. Chad Hollister, leader of the popular Chad Hollister Band, and his wife, artist Katie O’Rourke, were recipients of, and benefactors to, the burgeoning animal-care fund. Sometime around 2010 one of their cats developed an unusual hip malady. This was hard on the heels of having euthanized their elderly dog, Teik. Their children were small and emotions were raw for the Hollister/O’Rourke family. “We loved Luke so much,” says Hollister, “but surgery would have been at least a few thousand dollars. We were, ‘Good lord! It’s a cat!’ But they had developed this fund and Deb said they’d be happy to help out and do this surgery. “And they did. And I said ‘I want to replenish it so somebody else can have that,’ so we did a benefit at the Worcester Town Hall for the Mitzvah Fund.” It raised $3,000, Glottman recalls. “We love Deb and Connie so much,” Hollister continues. “And to think of what Deb has done for our animal community by creating the Mitzvah Fund, it’s beyond belief.” (Luke, however, ventured out one night and had a fatal encounter with a fisher.) There were countless similar stories during the Worcester years. Riggs remembers a young man who was studying wildlife conservation in college, when his dog developed a gall bladder condition that required multiple surgeries. “He was going to drop out of school and use his tuition money to pay for it,” says Riggs. “The Mitzvah Fund stepped in to cover the surgery so he could continue on and not miss a year of school.” Looking back, Glottmann says, “Some of the greatest people I’ve ever known were people I met in that practice and are still in our lives today. When we helped people with the Mitzvah Fund it would come back to us tenfold.” The Mitzvah Fund outlasted Worcester Veterinary Care, for, unable to sustain the practice while also attending to personal family matters, Riggs folded the practice in 2016. But the Mitzvah Fund still existed. So Glottmann and Riggs sought other opportunities to use it. Dan and Jody Kelly, who owned Stonecliff Veterinary Surgical Center just off State Street in Montpelier, offered their facility on Fridays and Saturdays, so that became Mitzvah’s very part-time center of operations for a few years. And then came February of 2022, when Baby Huey materialized.TGIF
As Huey nestles against the curb on this lovely July Friday morning, Deb Glottmann at the wheel, a well-choreographed routine unfolds. Two volunteers show up: Carol Johnson, a retired teacher from East Montpelier, and Abby Bruce, who once owned Ruby’s Run, a popular pet-boarding business that she sold to the Central Vermont Humane Society in 2008. Connie Riggs arrives, and they set out a few chairs and a folding table on the sidewalk, displaying brochures and application forms. Glottmann and Riggs prepare the van’s interior for the morning’s appointments. Although space is tight, there’s room for separate surgical and dental “suites.” The last owner was an orthopedic surgeon in Minnesota. Some of the medical equipment was adaptable for dogs and cats, but Glottmann has also invested in technology more suitable for quadrupeds. There are full-body and dental X-rays, a dental scaler, two anesthesia machines, and other exotic paraphernalia. There are also several small cages, a water heater, and 40-gallon water tank, “and a humongous generator,” says Glottmann, “so we can be downtown taking X-rays and doing everything we would do if we were plugged in. You just figure out what you need to do and how you can do it on the road.” Or parked in Montpelier. Typically, though, the Friday sessions are for intakes, preliminary examinations, and interviews with potential clients. Some minor procedures can be performed. If medical or dental surgery is needed they schedule it for upcoming Tuesdays and Thursdays, when they’ll perform it inside the van in Glottmann’s driveway just outside Montpelier’s city limits. Occasionally she’ll take the animal home with her when things shut down on Friday; more often she, or a volunteer such as Johnson or Bruce, will pick the pet up shortly before the surgery and deliver it to Glottmann’s house. (Riggs, hoping — finally — to live a quiet rural lifestyle in Vermont, tries to limit her work to three days a week.) Just as they’ve been modifying their mobile medical unit, Glottmann and Riggs have realized they need to moderate their ambitions for the Mitzvah Fund. The onslaught of COVID-19 revealed the crucial roles so many people play in supporting an interconnected, interdependent society, and all are deserving of aid and relief. In gratitude, Glottmann and Riggs tried to extend their services to first responders, firefighters, paramedics, veterans, people with disabilities … “Slowly but surely we’re learning what we can and can’t do,” Glottmann admits. “We have to place limits, and that’s hard for any caregiver to do. By necessity we’ve narrowed it down to low-income seniors, low-income veterans, and unhoused people.” There are other boundaries, too. Mitzvah can’t be available for emergency services, and cannot take on lifelong medical care for animals. Their goal is — must be — simply to get basic care to animals that haven’t had access to it, to address immediate issues such as dental disease that can lead to serious internal infections, to perform basic surgeries, and to help disadvantaged owners learn how best to care for their beloved companions. Sometimes Riggs and Glottmann spend hours consulting with social workers who not only confirm applicants’ income and housing status but often prepare them (and Mitzvah volunteers) for dealing with clients who are wary of social interaction. “You come to realize that every animal comes with a human being,” says Riggs. “Some of these people are phenomenal pet owners. These animals are like a lifeline for them.” Dave Sip appears to have none of these social inhibitions. He’s a gregarious fellow, a Marine Corps veteran who explains that he was homeless for a time in Boston and recently received a military award for helping other homeless vets in that area. That recognition attracted the attention of a sympathetic fellow-vet, who helped Dave fulfill a longtime ambition of moving to Vermont. He receives Veteran Disability Compensation, and, though spry, uses a cane.