My name is Dr. Angie Ruppel and I have been a practicing veterinarian since 2003.
I graduated in 2003 from UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine. I met my husband in Madison-he had just graduated from the Engineering program. I was in my last semester of Veterinary school. Together, we moved to Milwaukee and worked there for four years. In 2007, we married and moved to Cumberland-Rob’s hometown.
Small town Wisconsin is definitely where I belong. I love knowing my neighbors and my clients and seeing them at the grocery store.
Rob and I have four kids-two boys and two girls. A set of twins in there puts them all within three years of each other. Our furry children include an English Setter named England and some indoor/outdoor working pet cats.
In my free time, I enjoy mountain biking, cooking, and traveling. I am starting to explore some veterinary missionary work in Africa and Central America.
Purple Cat started in 2017, when I helped one farm whose cat population had gotten out of control. I performed these low-cost surgeries working with the Northern Lakes Veterinary Clinic in Cumberland. It was after this that I realized how much I enjoyed this type of work. Helping the folks that are trying to make a difference in the overpopulation of cats really brought a sense of purpose to me.
This is what brought me to Purple Cat. With my husband’s support in 2018, I put together a mobile surgery unit that I pulled on the back of our Suburban. It wasn’t the prettiest or the fanciest truck and trailer, but it served an important purpose: to offer low-cost cat spays and cat neuters in an effort to prevent homeless, starving, and diseased cats. Since that first year of Purple Cat, I have worked more and more with the county shelters in NW Wisconsin. I currently only use the truck and trailer when I go to farms to sterilize and vaccinate an entire colony of cats onsite.
From 2020 through 2022, most of my clinics were MASH type of clinics. MASH stands for Mobile Animal Surgery Hospital. MASH clinics are a type of spay-neuter program in which clinic staff transport surgical equipment to a venue and set up a temporary surgical space in that location. Surgeries are not performed in the MASH vehicle, but instead utilize an existing space in the community. We set up MASH clinics at several NW Wisconsin county humane societies including Rusk County (Ladysmith, WI), Buffalo County (Mondovi, WI), Chequamegon County (Ashland, WI), Douglas County (Superior, WI), Price County (Park Falls, WI) and Sawyer County (Hayward, WI).
In 2021, Purple Cat established two permanent locations-Baldwin and Eau Claire, WI. We are renting a building in Baldwin, WI. This location is popular among our Minneapolis-St. Paul and eastern Minnesota clients. We also bought a small building in Eau Claire, WI. Eau Claire is popular for our NW and middle Wisconsin folks. Dr. Angie does 45-55 cat surgeries at each location 3-4 days per week.
As of December 2022, Purple Cat has spayed and neutered over 25,000 cats.