Derrick Campana works in a field that he essentially created. “It wasn’t one of those things that as a kid you could dream of doing,” he says, “because there was no such thing.” He’s standing at a counter in his workshop—a cavernous room that looks like an auto-repair garage—in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Sterling, Va. The workshop is white, thanks in part to the plaster dust coating every surface. It’s hard to hear over the sound of the electric tools that Campana’s staff are using to create various orthotic devices for animals. Campana, wearing a white apron, is using a rasp-style file—not unlike the sort you might use to grate parmesan cheese—to sand a mold of a dog’s leg. His company, Animal OrthoCare, sends casting kits and instructions to pet owners and veterinarians, who then make a fiberglass cast of the animal’s affected limb and ship it back to his shop. Campana tweaks the casts, fills them with plaster to form a “positive mold” of the limb, and from there custom-fabricates either a brace or prosthetic.
Today he has a bin full of more than two dozen molds to catch up on, because he’s been away for a week in southern England, where he custom-built a pair of leg braces for a calf named Nipper Jackson. The calf was born with deformed front legs and, because it was useless as a farm animal, it would have been euthanized; instead, the Hugletts Wood Farm Animal Sanctuary southeast of London took it in, and flew Campana over to design and fabricate braces for it.
Campana has gotten media attention not only for helping Nipper Jackson and Jabu the African elephant, but also for building prosthetics for Mosha and Motala, two Thai elephants that stepped on land mines; Angel Marie, a miniature horse in Maine whose front legs had been crushed by her mother at birth; and a golden retriever in Arizona named Chi Chi, who had been left for dead in a dumpster in South Korea. (Chi Chi, who died in January, had four prosthetic legs and 55,000 Instagram followers; she was named “Most Heroic Dog” in the 2018 American Humane Hero Dog Awards.) Campana has also designed prosthetics and braces for sheep, goats, a bald eagle or two, even a few turtles and lizards. He has tried to help cats, but not many. “They’re the worst,” he says with a laugh. “Casting them is so hard. If I’m ever going to get bitten or scratched, it’s always a cat.” But 90 percent of his practice is dogs: ACL injuries, dislocated kneecaps, Achilles tendons, arthritis, amputated limbs.
Campana’s unlikely career started with an interest in sports medicine. He grew up in the small town of Clinton, N.Y., near Utica, and initially attended Norwich University, a private military college, on a soccer scholarship. His twin brother, Darrell, went to Penn State. “I was super jealous,” Derrick recalls, “because he was having fun and I was at a military college.” Eventually Derrick transferred to Penn State, where he majored in kinesiology, intending to work in athletic training or a similar field. (Darrell ’02 A&A is now a landscape architect in Philadelphia.)
As an undergraduate, Campana worked in the Center for Locomotion Studies under Peter Cavanagh, distinguished professor of biomechanics. For a NASA-funded project simulating locomotion in zero gravity, Campana designed a plastic shell for volunteers to wear while suspended in a harness; that experience in molding plastics to the human body was his first exposure to orthotics. After graduation, he moved to the D.C. area and, to gain experience in prosthetics and orthotics, volunteered as a back-room technician at the Hanger Clinic. Then he went off to the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern to get a master’s in orthotics, and returned to D.C. for a residency—which is when he had the serendipitous encounter with Kim Danoff and Charles.
Danoff, who herself is a veterinarian, was impressed enough with what Campana did for her own dog that she started referring some of her patients to him. Then he started marketing his services to other veterinarians—“I sat in my apartment in Arlington hand-addressing 500 envelopes for all the vets in the area to send out these little brochures”—and business picked up some more. When the first check he got paid for his entire rent for a month, he realized he might be able to make a living at it. He kept working as a prosthetist for human patients until, in 2012, Animal OrthoCare had grown enough that he could quit his day job and focus entirely on animals.