BUXTON — Dr. Samantha Brueckner is a sap.

The veterinarian uses that term to describe herself and wears it like a badge of honor in a field that, at the worst of times, can be heartbreaking. She converses with every animal she meets — even the ones that can’t hear — as she pets their heads and shushes them during examinations.

“Hi, beautiful girl!” Brueckner sang as she greeted her newest patient, Tamale, a rescue dog who bounded up to her on all fours during a recent appointment. 

Tamale is the latest animal to join Chelsea Waller’s makeshift menagerie of roughly 15 animals at her Buxton home. They’re all rescues, and they’re all Brueckner’s patients.

Brueckner’s Kennebunk-based business, Yin-Yang Veterinary Care, celebrated a year in March. The 36-year-old Saco resident has practiced on a wide variety of animals since graduating from veterinary school in 2019. 

While regular veterinary medicine typically encompasses pets such as cats and dogs or large animals such as cows and horses, Brueckner said her education left her equipped to treat more exotic creatures — everything from rabbits and birds to tarantulas and even tigers.

Her practice is a traveling affair. Whenever Brueckner prepares to visit a patient, she piles her equipment high in the back of her SUV, pretty much packing everything but an MRI machine.

That means Brueckner can literally meet the animals where they’re at, instead of forcing someone to wrangle their pet into a carrier. Animals who are typically terrified of the vet’s office are also much more at ease when they’re able to stay in a place familiar to them. 

When Brueckner arrives at Waller’s house for the annual checkup of her two rabbits, Topanga and Kyoto, she already knows her way around. She knows where Kyoto might run off to and how to guide her technician, Monica, to assist her in luring the rabbits out of their house.

“Seeing Dr. Brueckner has been great, especially for the anxious animals and the sad cases,” Waller said.

Brueckner was there when Waller had to put down her dog Leroy — which made it just a little bit easier for her.

Waller used to have to see several different veterinarians with different specialties, to care for Tamale and two other dogs, plus two rabbits, three cats, three pigs, a lizard and some fish.

“Dr. Brueckner can take care of all of them,” Waller said.

Brueckner occasionally offers free clinics and checkups in her community, sometimes to help community members who can’t afford the bills for their furry friends.

“ As a small business, I’m wanting to do things that follow my morals and my beliefs that also help give back to the community, too,” she said.

Brueckner hails from Arkansas and, like so many others in her field, always knew what she wanted to be. Working with animals was always the end game. There was one thing about her path that was different: She wanted to work with exotic animals, too. 

She remembers the moment it struck her: when a koala crawled up her leg at an Australian zoo during a study abroad program in college. As a volunteer, she didn’t have the clearance to handle the animals, but the koala couldn’t have cared less. 

“The zookeeper came, rolled her eyes and said, ‘We just have to stop our day and give (the koala) a hug at times,’ and I remember thinking: ‘This is amazing,’” Brueckner recalled. “If I wanna spend all this time and student debt to become a vet, why don’t I work with animals that most people never get to interact with?”

Working with those kinds of animals can be very different from your average dog or cat. Symptoms present differently, medication doses fluctuate, and many pets that are prey in the wild hide any forms of discomfort or weakness as a survival instinct.

Brueckner said one of the hardest parts for many exotic pet owners is that when there’s something wrong, many pet owners won’t know until it’s too late. 

Yin-Yang Veterinary Care is named after Brueckner’s “soul dog,” Yin-Yang, who came into her life as soon as she finished her undergraduate studies and was her dog for 10 years.

“ He was like the animal yin to my human yang, the good to my bad,” she said.

She remembers studying anatomy on Yin-Yang, ever the helpful patient, while she was in veterinary school, and how his presence helped her during the bad days.

As she came to terms with working around so much loss on a day-to-day basis, it was getting to hug her gentle giant that often kept her going.

After Yin-Yang died, Brueckner named her practice after him to honor the love that she felt for him — and how she brings that love to her patients every day.