Dr. Hindatu Muhammad always had a sense that she'd be a doctor.

I'm from Nigeria. I was born in Nigeria, but I grew up in this country, and so sort of immigrant family, my dad at an early age for me, was said, oh, you know, you should be a doctor.

And I said, okay, your immigrant parent tells you to do something, you just do it. So I was like, all right, I'm going to be a doctor.

But what kind of doctor would she be?

A fateful encounter with an insect helped her answer that question.

There's one day, and it's so clear to me still years later,

where I was outside kind of playing in the dirt,

and I came across an ant,

and I had inadvertently dismembered this ant just by, you know, with my stick.

And I just felt this overwhelming sense of just sadness and this guilt that I was like, oh my gosh, like I hurt this animal, this creature that I didn't intend to.

And it's not their fault.

And I tried to repair this broken ant.

Spoiler alert, it did not live you know

and so I just remember feeling that day like gosh animals really we as humans are so much more

powerful than them and they're so vulnerable compared to us and it really it just got me thinking

about like I really think that they deserve to have people that are looking out for them and

that are advocating for them and I think that once that shift kind of took over for me, that was it. I was like,

people don't need more people to take care of them. The animals need more people to take care of them.

And so she did become a doctor, a veterinary medicine, a vet. She's been practicing for nearly 20

years and owns Allendale Veterinary Clinic in Austin, Texas.

Her sympathy for ants, though, did not extend into adulthood.

The irony is that now I'm an ant killer. Like, I'll kill any ant. I hate insects so badly if I don't care about anything at all.

...