Dr. Ferguson and Dr. Hodges administer a de-wormer medication to a goat for parasites in its stool. (National Geographic)
Nat Geo WILD is bringing out new shows featuring veterinarians, and earlier this year we saw the release of Heartland Docs, DVM, a series following a family helping tend the community’s farm animals and the preservation of the nation’s food supply. Critter Fixers: Country Vets is another show airing on the network on Saturday, March 7th at 19/9c.
Critter Fixers: Country Vets follows Dr. Hodges and Dr. Ferguson, two lifelong friends who run Critter Fixer Veterinary Hospital in a rural town of Georgia. The physicians and their team have one goal in mind, and that’s to treat and take care of their patients. With their heart, soul, and humor, they take on cases including a police dog with cactus thorns around her eyes and a potbellied pig with life-threatening lacerations.
“Critter Fixers is our heart,” Dr. Hodge said. “It started as a little 800 square foot building in Byron, Georgia. And it has grown into two large veterinarian hospitals”
“We’ve been open for 20 years, going on 21 years,” Dr. Ferguson said.
Courtesy of National Geographic
The two doctors were picked for their personalities, and after some hesitation, the two decided to accept the TV show offer.
“I got a call one day from Hit+Run, and it was Noah Korn,” Dr. Hodges said. “Actually he DM me, and I did what anybody else would do, I ignored him. He said, ‘How would you like to be on TV?’ And I ignored him two or three times. He finally said, ‘Look, I’m going to call your office.’ So he called our office, and we had a conversation and he was like, let’s Skype. I don’t Skype with a lot of people being in the middle of Georgia, but he was like, ‘Cool.’ So I called Terrence and said, ‘Hey T, what do you think about being on a TV show?’ After a brief pause, he said, ‘Alright, let’s do it. If you want to do it, then let’s do it.'”
“And I was a little apprehensive,” Dr. Ferguson said. “Dr. Hodges will throw these things at you a lot of times. So it’s just like, ‘I’ll go along with it.’ I still didn’t believe it. Actually, there was someone who actually wanted to do a show of us, two country guys from Middle Georgia. We did end up doing Skype. And from there, they came out for a week and shot some footage and presented it to Nat Geo, and here we are.”
“We like to call it country swag,” Dr. Hodges described their personalities. “We got a little swag; we got a little country. I think that caught their eyes, and also there aren’t a lot of African Americans veterinarians. We’re maybe two and a half percent of the population. Out of that 2.5%, they found the country boys with swag.”
“We’re kind of the opposite,” Dr. Ferguson explained. “He has a way of doing things, and I have my way of doing things, but they’re married, almost like putting the key in the lock. We complement each other. And it does work very well. We just like to enjoy ourselves and have fun.”
“You’ll get to see a lot of southern hospitality and it is not fake,” he continued. “We are who we are. We love our clients because we are in a relatively small area compared to the larger metropolitan areas. We know all our clients, we know their family, and we’ve all grown together. We’re going to give them a hug, and they’ll give us a hug. And we just have that relationship where even though they’re our clients, they’re our family members. Even though they have pets, their pets are members of the family. Those are our favorites. So we treat them all.”
Critter Fixers: Country Vets premieres on Nat Geo WILD on Saturday, March 7th at 10/9c.
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