We love a dog lover here at Scratch. But a dog lover with a degree in dog has been on our vision board for years. Finding the right person to be our in-house vet was something we always knew would take time. Someone with the same passion for dog health, nutrition and transparency as us. Someone who’s seen first-hand the effect of crap dog food on our furry mates. And most of all, someone who genuinely backs what we’re doing to fix it. A bit of a unicorn? Maybe. But we’ve finally found ‘em. Meet Dr. Sam!
We’re seriously excited to have her on board – for free advice for our own hoard of office dogs, sure – but mostly for you and your pooch. Dr. Sam’s here to help answer your questions on dog nutrition and share nuggets of wisdom on making your dog’s nuggets nicer. She joins our dog food nutritionists plus our co-founder & resident dog food nerd, Doug to round out our dream team of experts in dog health.
To celebrate we thought we’d tick off another item from the bucket list: let a litter of puppies loose in the office and film the mayhem. Enjoy!
Here are five things to know about Dr. Sam:
She’s dogged.
Unlike the rest of us who said we wanted to be vets when we grew up and forgot about it, Sam stuck to her guns. As a kid, she enjoyed taking care of dogs and cats and even a bearded dragon so dreamt of nothing else. She officially earned the title Doctor of Veterinary Medicine in 2019.
She really loves animals.
Like completed eight years of study loves them. Dr. Sam has an undergrad in Animal & Vet Biosciences from La Trobe Uni and Doctorate of Veterinary Medicine from the University of Melbourne. How lucky are we?
She also loves your dogs’ guts.
And she loves ‘em as much as we do. Dr. Sam discovered a special interest in canine gastrointestinal health during her first internship. She finds the gut fascinating, especially all the factors that can influence it and the ripple effect onto a dog’s overall wellbeing.
She’s from Melbourne too.
We have the same hometown. Dr. Sam grew up here, so has as much of an unhealthy obsession with coffee quality as you’d expect. She also lives for the Melbourne Football Club (much to the dismay of Swans diehard, Mike and Blues fan, Doug).
She’s a new mum.
Dr. Sam has already created some great content for us but it’s far from her best work. She’s also mum to a very cute daughter, Harriet and a cat Viney. (We won’t hold the cat thing against her).
Dr. Samantha Rulli
Scratch Veterinarian
If you’ve got a question about symptoms that could be related to food, switching to Scratch or nutrition advice for certain medical conditions, chuck it through to [email protected] and she’ll get back to you.
Dr. Sam will be our go-to for decisions about dog health. She’ll be sharing her own knowledge as well as all the latest research with the team, so we can keep making grub that’s good for guts. You’ll also find her in customer service. Making sure your dogs are looked after and you feel more educated too. We couldn’t quite tear her away from the clinic completely, so she’ll split her time between here and there.
A huge thanks to All 4 Paws Dog Rescue for letting us hang out and film with these cute rescue pups. Find out more about their amazing work at all4pawsdogrescue.com.au.