Sarah Carey, the college’s director of communications, inside the lobby of the Veterinary Academic Building. (Photo by Cat Wofford)

By Bill Levesque

Anuket, a 341-pound, 10.5-foot-long Nile crocodile from St. Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park, ate a shoe in 2020. Actually, he mulishly ate it a few times, perhaps annoyed at regurgitating the unexpected bounty.

A University of Florida Veterinary Hospitals zoological medicine resident later pushed his arm into the sedated reptile’s mouth up to his shoulder, trying to reach the thing. Arms, however, are seldom long enough in such endeavors. Surgery was required.

Sarah Carey, standing nearby, is a storyteller. Hers is the realm of nonfiction because, well, you can’t make this stuff up.

Carey raised a camera. And with a few shutter clicks, Anuket became the most famous crocodile on the planet, for a couple of days anyway, as Carey’s photos circled the globe.

And so it goes, another day in the work life of a communicator who, for nearly 35 years, has been the voice of the UF College of Veterinary Medicine.

Come May, this long, strange trip ends with Carey’s retirement as the college’s first communications director.

Since August 1990, Carey, 67, has been an award-winning writer, photographer, magazine editor, crisis manager, and creative mind amid the tumult of a veterinary college that has grown in size and stature during her tenure. She’s written a veritable library of articles about animals in peril and their fretful humans; researchers illuminating the boundaries of animal science; and the achievements of faculty and staff she always viewed more as friends than colleagues.

Sarah Carey looks through old photos from the grand opening of the Veterinary Academic Building in 1996. Her file cabinet holds dozens of folders filled with photos from college life and stories of faculty members past and present.  (Photo by Cat Wofford)

Her career spanned five deans and two interim deans. Carey is, in a sense, the collective memory of UF veterinary medicine.

“I’m really grateful for the time and energy that Sarah’s put into this job,” said Dana N. Zimmel, D.V.M., a professor and dean of the UF College of Veterinary Medicine. “She cares deeply about the people and the animals and the college. She has the gift of providing information in an honorable and graceful way.”

Carey looks forward to spending more time with her husband, Chad Hunsaker, and other family members, friends, her black labrador Finn and the poetry that has been honored nationally and is her creative lodestar.

While Sarah Carey wrote about real creatures of different species, she also collected stuffed animals made by a local artist and kept them in her office. Soon, she’ll be taking them home. (Photo by Cat Wofford)

“My time here has passed in the blink of an eye,” Carey said. “I’ve tried to make a difference. I would like for people to remember me as a steady hand, a good friend, someone who tried to make the college a little better by sharing the impactful stories of our faculty and staff, and as someone who celebrated their successes with them.”

Carey was born in North Carolina but grew up in Florida, moving to Tallahassee, where her late father was a chaplain and later vice president for student affairs at Florida State University before returning to the faculty as a professor of religion.

She earned a master’s degree with a concentration in creative writing at FSU. At one point, Carey’s mentor and master’s advisor handed her creative thesis back, unhappy. He admonished her, “Revise. Revise. Revise.” She later cried, but the lesson was retained. The poems in the thesis were better for it.

Life, like an unfinished manuscript, is a series of revisions.

Carey always loved to read as a child, and reading turned to writing. She started in journalism as a reporter and then editor of the Gadsden County Times. She took a class to become a certified emergency medical technician but soon abandoned volunteer work because blood sickened her. She moved to a citrus trade journal. And Carey eventually came to Gainesville, where she one day entered a gym for a workout and left after having met her future husband on an adjacent StairMaster®.

Sarah Carey with the first printed issues of the Veterinary Page internal newsletter and the Florida Veterinarian external newsletter, which came out in November 1990 and winter of 1991, respectively. Carey developed and edited both publications, which have been published continuously since then. The Veterinary Page moved online in the early 2000s, and Florida Veterinarian became a magazine in the mid-2000s.

Along the way, she became a poet.

Carey’s free-verse poems are waypoints on a map of her life. Often autobiographical, they put the people and places of her past under poetry’s lens, the past framing the present.

She has published two poetry booklets with different presses, and her first full-length poetry collection, “The Grief Committee Minutes,” was released by Saint Julian Press in late 2024. Carey recently signed a contract with Mercer University Press for a second book.

Sarah Carey with her dog, Finn, and husband, Chad Hunsaker, inside the lobby of UF’s Small Animal Hospital.

“I’ve always lived with one foot in the past,” Carey said. “And in my poetry, I regularly mine the memories of my parents and my childhood. They all live in my head every day.”

Carey says that writing is like breathing to her, but so, too, is her ability to make a human connection. Lovingly loquacious, Carey can launch a conversation with anyone.

Paulette Hahn, M.D., a UF Health rheumatologist, met Carey in the 1990s during her residency. They began chatting at a party, eventually becoming good friends. They visited Switzerland on holiday.

On a side trip to Paris, Hahn said she watched, amused as Carey chatted with the cabbie in his native French.

“She knew about the driver’s family before we left the cab,” Hahn said. “That’s Sarah. She’s authentic. She doesn’t hesitate to be vulnerable. She’s completely committed to anyone and anything in her life.”

Carey loved her work at UF. In a world of so many personalities, she flourished, tirelessly working, checking her email on vacations or late into the evening.

“She’s very driven,” husband Chad Hunsaker said. “She likes to be in the middle of things.”

The animals that were often Carey’s subjects fill a proverbial ark.

Bob, the 660-pound alligator with a bum leg. Hannibal the Friesian colt battling colic. Yankee the yellow lab who ate a bamboo barbecue skewer. Daisy Mae the goat, adorned in a dress, rehabilitated after a rare disease diagnosis. Lulu, the miniature Jersey cow, treated for cataracts.

Along the way, Carey’s writing helped raise awareness with the public and donors that the veterinary college needed a new facility, the current UF Small Animal Hospital, which was built in 2009 and opened a year later.

“She was instrumental in the fundraising effort,” said Joe DiPietro, D.V.M., dean of the UF College of Veterinary Medicine from 1997 to 2006.

Carey founded the school’s holiday food drive. She wrote about the college researcher, Cynda Crawford, D.V.M., Ph.D., who helped discover the canine influenza ravaging greyhounds in Florida. And she detailed the work of scientists who solved the case of mysteriously dying polo ponies. She recounted the lives of former faculty when they passed away, pulling her decades-old stories from a file drawer.

And she always tapped a deep well of empathy whenever the moment called for it.

Doug Bennett, then a writer at UF Health, brought his sick dog, Scooby Doo, into the UF Small Animal Hospital several years ago. The Old English Sheepdog was diagnosed with advanced lymphoma.

A sick dog is a family member, stricken and helpless. Bennett sat distraught.

Before long, Carey found Bennett. They talked for hours. The distraction was a welcome interlude. Finally, he couldn’t help but ask, “Sarah, don’t you have important things to do?”

“Yes,” she responded. “But this is the most important thing for me right now.”

Carey is proud of her contributions to a great institution.

“I know I did the best I could,” Carey said. “I tried to be a good coworker and a team player, to work hard and to have fun doing it. I’ve also tried to have a meaningful work-life balance — to be a good family member and a good partner to my husband of 28 years. I’m not sure I’ve always succeeded; like all of us, I’m a work in progress.

“But I’ve tried to just keep moving and doing the next right thing; bad days soon become good days, and the world rocks along.”

Anuket, the croc who ate a shoe, and all the other animals and humans who color the canvas of Carey’s career salute her.