Stacey Benton, Ph.D. '98, D.V.M. '02, is loaded up with Cornell memories

By Roger Segelken

During Sunday's Commencement address, if President Hunter Rawlings asks graduates to reminisce, Stacey Benton will have much more than four years' worth of Cornell memories. She's been here 10 years, first earning a Ph.D. in neurobiology and now a doctor of veterinary medicine degree.

And some of her fondest recollections involve animals.

D.V.M. candidate Stacey Benton gives a friend a bite to eat. Charles Harrington/University Photography

Benton remembers winters, unlike the last, when enough snow fell to go out "ski-joring" with her dogs. Describing the sport's special rigging -- a harness on the canine to pull a waist belt on the skier -- she points out, "It takes planning to ski on the same side of trees as the dog."

Her two dogs are special, too. Not exotic purebreds but "SPCA specials," Benton says of the mutts she rescued from the local animal shelters; and she acquired two cats the same way.

Of course Benton recalls how she met the co-owner of those special animals -- she was introduced to her husband-to-be through the High Noon Athletic Club. Chris Mansfield was among that loose-knit band of lunchtime campus runners, and he was finishing his first Cornell degree, a Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering, before attending law school here. The two were married in 1999 -- and in another marvel of timing, both double-degree holders are graduating together.

Benton remembers the exact moment when she decided to stop researching animals for her degree in neurobiology and behavior and start to learn to heal them. After months of rehabilitating and trying to socialize an injured red-tailed hawk at Cayuga Nature Center -- and a final three hours one frigid winter day as she tempted the hawk with a dead rat -- the flightless raptor trusted Benton enough to perch on her gloved hand. The hawk, whose wing was irreparably damaged in an accident,went on to provide an education for hundreds of visitors to the nature center, while Benton went to veterinary school.

Her Ph.D. research had involved brain development and vocalization in songbirds, trying to discover how they learn their distinctive calls and remember them from one season to the next. Benton, herself, developed a prodigious memory, as well as the other study skills needed to keep her at the top of the D.V.M. class each semester. Her potential for making important contributions to animal welfare was recognized when she was awarded a Michele and Agnese Cestone Foundation Scholarship, which paid tuition and expenses for her last three years in veterinary college. "I am extraordinarily grateful for the support I received from the Cestone Foundation," Benton said.

Benton's experience with animal nervous systems, she expects, will give her extra insight to diagnose and treat pets' neurological disorders, such as spinal cord injuries and brain tumors. But she won't be board-certified in the specialty, at least for now, because that would take several years of residency in a teaching hospital. "I'm ready," she said, "to get out of academics and into the real world."

And she'll never forget her favorite veterinary professor, the "phenomenal Dr. D.," as Benton calls Alexander deLahunta, and she sat in the front row of his neurology class, raising her hand to answer every question until the James Law Professor of Anatomy told her, gently, to cool it. She brought her father, a pediatric neuroradiologist, from Cincinnati to meet deLahunta, and they found many common interests, talking about a zoo hippopotamus that suffered seizures, among other things neurological.

Benton said she'd sooner forget the rectal exams of cows that every veterinary student must practice for their large-animal training. "I'll blow up that long exam glove one more time for Commencement," she said of the balloonlike totems fellow graduates traditionally wave during the ceremony to symbolize how far they reached for a veterinarian's education.

Much shorter gloves are in Benton's future when she moves back to her home state, New Hampshire, to work at a small-animal practice in the Concord area. Besides the usual cats and dogs, she was told to expect "lots of ferrets," an increasingly popular household pet.

And there should be plenty of snow for ski-joring in New Hampshire. Great mountain scenery, too. Although Benton and Mansfield may have to build an addition to hang all their Cornell diplomas on the wall.