Dr. Becker was born in Cedar Falls, Iowa and grew up loving animals. By the time she was 13, she had already been volunteering at her local humane society. She apprenticed to become a state wildlife rehabilitator when she was 14, and became a federally licensed wildlife rehabilitator when she turned 16. She maintains permits to rehabilitate endangered species.
After graduating from veterinary school in 1997, Dr. Becker founded the first proactive animal hospital in the Midwest in 1999, opened an exotic animal clinic in 2001 and a rehabilitation and pain management clinic in 2011. She has helped tens of thousands of patients using an integrative approach to internal medicine as well as an array of progressive diagnostics and innovative treatment protocols to help her patients recover from disease, but her passion is proactive medicine: identifying and removing lifestyle obstacles before the body breaks.
The foundation of health and wellness is food; food choices can heal or harm our family, including pets. We know feeding our family only ultra-processed “fast food” (a.k.a. kibble, for pets) isn’t a wise long-term strategy to create thriving bodies, in fact, the opposite occurs. A lifetime of highly refined food consumption is the recipe for disease and degeneration, for our bodies, and animals.
Diet, along with a myriad of other key lifestyle choices and decisions animal guardians are responsible for making, is what ultimately influences our pets’ healthspan. In 2021, Dr. Becker co-wrote the first No. 1 New York Times best-selling book about intentionally creating canine wellbeing, "The Forever Dog."