Rescue & Adoption

'Thank You for Not Ignoring Me': The Street Vet Who Wrote the Book on Mercy

Dr. Kwane Stewart has spent more than a decade treating the pets of people living on the street. His memoir, What It Takes to Save a Life, is about far more than veterinary medicine, and the year it came out, the country noticed.

By Marcus Webb, Products & Living Writer

December 11, 2023 · 6 min read

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If you spend any time in the corner of the internet where rescue stories live, you already know Dr. Kwane. The San Diego veterinarian, better known online as “The Street Vet,” has spent more than a decade doing something disarmingly simple and quietly radical: walking up to people living on the street, kneeling down, and treating their pets for free. His memoir, What It Takes to Save a Life: A Veterinarian’s Quest for Healing and Hope, is the fullest version yet of how he got there, and it lands as one of the more moving pet-world reads of the year.

The work behind the book

Through his nonprofit, Project Street Vet, Stewart has treated thousands of animals belonging to unhoused people across the country. The math of that is bigger than it first sounds. Every pet he keeps healthy is also a person he keeps company with, a relationship he helps protect for someone who may have very little else. For a lot of his patients’ owners, that dog or cat is the steadiest thing in their life, and losing it to a treatable condition would be its own kind of grief.

Stewart is open that the work saved him, too. He has described a period of pulling away from the people in his life, letting calls from his own mother go unanswered for days, and how the street outreach pulled him back toward connection. That candor is the spine of the book. He doesn’t present himself as a saint who descended to help, but as someone who found his footing by helping.

What’s actually in What It Takes to Save a Life

The memoir traces two threads at once: how Stewart became a veterinarian and then, after a mental-health crisis, redirected his career to full-time street outreach, and the stories of the people and animals he’s met along the way. In classic street-vet fashion, he doesn’t keep the spotlight on himself for long.

One story he’s shared publicly centers on Richard Lyons, a man in his seventies whom Stewart counts among the most devoted animal lovers he’s crossed paths with. Lyons, who lives with PTSD, has spoken about the specific comfort of a dog settling into his lap on a hard day and choosing him over everything else. Stewart, backed by donations to Project Street Vet’s ongoing fundraiser, made it possible for Lyons’s dog Courtney to undergo surgery for 100 bladder stones without Lyons paying a cent. Multiply that kind of intervention across a decade and you get the scale of what Project Street Vet actually does.

The book isn’t only feel-good, and that’s what keeps it from being sentimental. Stewart writes candidly about veterinary compassion fatigue, the toll of caring for the sick and dying that wears down so many people in his field. He writes about the misperceptions and mistreatment unhoused people face. And he writes about his own financial and mental-health struggles, inviting readers to sit with the hard, necessary questions he’s wrestled with while helping people the rest of the world tends to look past.

“Compassion fatigue is one of the least talked-about occupational hazards in veterinary medicine, and it’s a real one,” says Dr. Ravi Mehta. “What makes a book like this valuable is that it treats a vet’s mental health as part of the story, not a footnote. The people who care for animals need care too, and saying so out loud helps.”

What’s new since this was written

The book was published in May 2023. What happened next turned Stewart from a beloved-online figure into a nationally recognized one: in December 2023, he was named CNN Hero of the Year at the network’s annual gala at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The award came with a $100,000 prize, plus an additional $300,000 from the Elevate Prize Foundation, and in a gesture that surprised no one who’s followed his work, Stewart announced from the stage that he would split the money evenly among his fellow nominees.

Project Street Vet has also grown well beyond San Diego, expanding its free clinics and street outreach to other cities. The recognition and the resources are helping the mission reach more of the “unseen” people and pets the book is written about, which is, in the end, the whole point.

Worth reading

What It Takes to Save a Life is a good pick for anyone who loves animals and wants to see pet parenthood through a wider lens, one that includes the people society most often overlooks. It’s honest about the cost of caring and clear-eyed about why it’s worth it anyway. If it moves you, the most direct way to extend what it describes is to support Project Street Vet’s ongoing work.

What It Takes to Save a Life: A Veterinarian’s Quest for Healing and Hope is available at Amazon.