He Didn't Grow Up Around Horses. Now He's Written the Funniest Book About Becoming a Horse Vet You'll Read This Year

Dr. Matt Evans on imposter syndrome, prolapsed pig rectums, and why comedy and vet medicine are basically the same job

Dr. Matt Evans had a dream, and it was a fairly specific one: become a veterinarian, the way James Herriot made it look in every worn paperback he read as a kid. Somewhere along the way, that dream narrowed even further, into becoming an equine vet specifically. There was just one small problem. Matt Evans had never been around horses in his life.

That gap, between the dream and the actual qualifications for the dream, is the entire engine behind Chomping at the Bit: How I Became a Horse Vet (Against All Common Sense), Evans' new memoir out September 8 from Permuted Press. It follows him into and out of veterinary school, through his first job, and into a career most people would have quietly walked away from somewhere around the first prolapsed pig rectum.

Evans, DVM, graduated from Texas A&M and now practices outside Austin, Texas, where he also performs stand-up comedy in his spare time. If that combination sounds unlikely, it is exactly the point. “Comedy is just a conversation,” he says. “A one-sided conversation where only I get to talk and you all better shut up and just laugh, but still, just a conversation.” According to Evans, it was actually the client work that taught him how to read a room, not the other way around.

The Marathon Nobody Told Him He Was Behind In

Vet students who grew up on farms or in the saddle arrive with a head start most people never think about: reading a nervous horse, knowing where not to stand, understanding what a flattened ear actually means before it costs you a rib. Evans had none of that. Asked what skill the “horse kids” already had that he had to build from zero, his answer is blunt. “They had all of them.”

Catching a nervous or outright aggressive horse was, in his words, especially daunting early on. The advice that eventually got him through it doubled as a decent summary of large animal practice in general: act confident, and also, the back end can kill you, so watch out for that too. Just watch out for it confidently.

“Tubing a colic by myself at 2am when it was still 95 degrees out, covered in enough sweat that it looked like I fell in a lake with my clothes on, I thought: this is not very romantic.”

Imposter Syndrome Doesn't Expire

If there is one thing vet students and new grads talk about constantly, and rarely hear addressed by someone further down the road, it is imposter syndrome. Evans' answer is not the reassuring one people usually want. It never fully went away for him. Each time he thought he had a handle on being a horse vet, something new arrived to unsettle it: practice ownership, then building a referral hospital, then advanced skills he half-jokingly describes as problematic, mostly because they involve pulling a lot of horse teeth.

He is, by his own account, still faking it in places most people would never guess. “I feel like a fraud answering interview questions,” he admits, before immediately asking that this particular quote not make it back to the interviewer. It already has.

The Chapter He'd Actually Want a First-Year Student to Read

Asked which single chapter he would want a first-year vet student to read before clinicals, assuming they don't have time for the whole book, Evans doesn't hesitate: “Running Anesthesia for Bill Parcells.” It is the chapter that gets closest to the real tension of the job, taking what you learned in a classroom and applying it to an actual case under real pressure, along with the genuine heartbreak that comes with loss in this profession. It also, notably, contains a joke about a rhinoceros that he declines to spoil here.

That tonal whiplash, sincere one paragraph and absurd the next, is the whole book in miniature. Evans doesn't see humor as a way of avoiding the hard parts of practice. If anything, he argues the opposite: to make a joke about something, you have to understand it well enough to see exactly what's incongruous about it. He backs this up, only half-jokingly, by quoting Viktor Frankl on humor's ability to create distance from suffering, then immediately undercutting his own credibility by pointing out that the word people are probably looking for is either erudite or arrogant.

What Kept Him In It

Equine practice has one of the highest burnout and attrition rates in veterinary medicine, and Evans is candid that he does not have some secret reserve of resilience the rest of the profession is missing. What he has, by his own description, is tenacity, and a practical incentive most veterinarians will recognize immediately: significant debt acquired around the same time he and his partner bought the practice. Showing up to work, he notes, is generally easier than what happens if you don't pay back a loan shark.

There was a real inflection point, a crisis he keeps mostly under wraps for the book itself, where he seriously considered leaving equine medicine to become a landscaper instead. He likes trees. He also, by his own admission, is afraid of heights, which he did not think all the way through before deciding trees were the backup plan.

What He Wants Readers to Walk Away With

Evans is candid that this book isn't only for veterinarians. He wants pet owners and animal lovers with no connection to the profession to get a real, behind-the-scenes look at what it actually takes to become and remain a vet, in the spirit of Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, minus most of the sex, smoking, and cocaine. Not none of it. Just less.

“Take a deep breath, you're gonna make it. Try to enjoy it all. Well, enjoy it as much as you can. Histology lab can only be so much fun.”

That's the advice Evans says he'd give someone starting vet school tomorrow, if he had to boil twenty-some years of equine practice down to one sentence. Less advice, more permission to actually get through it.

About the Book

Title: Chomping at the Bit: How I Became a Horse Vet (Against All Common Sense)

Author: Matt Evans, DVM

Publisher: Permuted Press

Publication Date: September 8, 2026

Format: Paperback, 270 pages

Price: $19.99

ISBN: 9798895655955