Ivo Kunštýř was born on 24 January 1932, his father was a veterinarian. He graduated from a French grammar school in Prague and started studying at veterinary medical school afterwards. Due to political reasons, he had to study at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Košice, however, he finished his studies in Brno in 1956. Until 1968 he worked at the Veterinary Research Centre in Prague. After the invasion of the Soviet armies in August 1968, he emigrated to Vienna and later to West Germany. From 1970, he worked as a veterinarian for experimental animals at Hannover Medical School’s Central Laboratory for Experimental Animals; he acquired his teaching certification there in 1975. He worked as a professor at the Faculty of Medicine. He was granted West Germany citizenship in 1978 and stripped of his Czechoslovak in the same year. He actively participated in Czechoslovak exile activities. In 1986, he was a founding member of the Czechoslovak Documentation Centre of Independent Literature, which was founded in West Germany and led by the historian Vilém Prečan.

Ivo Kunštýř participated at many scientific conferences and symposiums focusing on laboratory animals. He published in scientific journals, but also wrote short works of fiction under his pen name of Jaroslav Pulda. He retired in 1997 and died in Hannover on 1 August 2013.