Doc Halligan's What Every Pet Owner Should Know


Posted on Mar 14, 2008
By Julia Szabo

by Karen Halligan  

Collins, 336 pages, $15.95  

When you adopt your first dog, there are plenty of important things you won't know, and many of those mysteries have to do with your new pet's health. Not all vets want to help us lay folk understand those mysteries (it's potentially more lucrative to keep people in the dark), so often we wind up learning them the hard way: after a few expensive trips to the emergency animal hospital. But Karen "Doc" Halligan is one of the few vets who want to help us stay out of her office. And her book, an excellent health primer and reference guide for the first-time dog owner, does exactly that.  

After 20 years as a veterinarian, Doc Halligan has managed to stay down-to-earth, never retreating into dispassionate corporate or academic mode. She's happy to share her wisdom with millions through frequent appearances on TV and in magazines. What's great about her is her natural ability to see things from her clients' viewpoint - and that says a lot about her as a humanitarian who has compassion for people as well as pets.

Plus, her common-sense approach goes beyond pills and pulse readings to embrace nutrition and lifestyle advice. Halligan's main focus is prevention: preventing illness before it can start by practicing safety at home, which in turn prevents having to make more trips to the vet than you need to in your dog's lifetime. That life will be long and happy, if you follow the Doc's sound, no-nonsense advice.  

Here's another thing Doc Halligan wants to help prevent: pet overpopulation, which inevitably leads to the killing of healthy shelter puppies just for lack of available homes. This, she rightly points out, is "wrong." As director of veterinary services for the SPCA in Los Angeles, she sees the results of unaltered dogs every day, and advocates passionately on behalf of spay-neuter awareness and education.

The good doctor's passion is contagious, in this book and in person; here's hoping it kindles a spay-neuter epidemic! 
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