Dr. Daniel Olson with a feline patient, above, and with his own pet parrot Bonny, below.
Dr. Daniel Olson provides palliative care for your pets at home
DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer
taffet@dallasvoice.com
Dr. Daniel Olson has been making house calls for more than two years now. He mostly works in his Oak Lawn neighborhood but also ventures out to Uptown, Lakewood and even Oak Cliff.
The young doctor said he’s hopes he’s leading the way for his generation to bring back a type of in-home medical care that was lost 30 or maybe even 50 years ago.
Oh, but there is one stipulation — Olson is a veterinarian. Those house calls he’s making are for your dogs and cats.
Olson started his practice doing hospice work: alleviating pain, helping a dog suffering from seizures, helping as an animal’s arthritis worsened.
But then he branched out into what he calls concierge care: at-home care for a 120-pound Great Dane that doesn’t travel well in a car, or a cat that doesn’t do well in an office filled with dogs.
What he is NOT is an emergency veterinary clinic. And he doesn’t work around the clock, although he has been called for emergencies with pets already in his care. His specialty is older dogs and cats.
“It’s rewarding to work with geriatric pets,” Olson said. “None of these problems are new, but we have more resources than ever now.”
In addition to giving a pet injections to control its diabetes or pain from cancer or arthritis, he’ll work with the pet owner to decide when the dog or cat has reached that tipping point.
He said it’s always sad when the animal isn’t as spry as it used to be and maybe can’t easily jump up on the couch with you anymore. But at some point, a decision may need to be made about euthanizing the animal.
“I look at the markers of the quality of life,” Olson said.
Those markers include whether the animal is eating enough, sleeping most of the time, if they’re no longer comfortably and happily doing the dog or cat things they used to do.
“Not happy going for a walk,” he explained. “Not happy to see you.”
While euthanizing a pet you’ve had for a number of years usually has a sad connotation, Olson said he makes things more comfortable and less fearful.
“I take them with me,” he said. “And I work with a funeral home to have them cremated.”
Olson couldn’t predict how long he keeps an animal in palliative care. He said it could be days or weeks; in some cases it’s been more than a year.
He said one of the things that helps keep dogs and cats healthy longer is keeping them up on their vaccines.
For dogs that includes rabies, influenza — there was a bad outbreak last year, he said — leptospirosis, which is common in Texas, and DHPP, a four-in-one vaccine that includes parvo prevention.
For cats, there’s also a rabies vaccine. Then he recommends a feline leukemia shot and an FVRCP, which protects against a variety of upper respiratory viruses.
While his specialty is in dogs and cats and in palliative care, Olson has had some experience working on exotics and wildlife that includes possums, squirrels, a raccoon, birds and snakes. He even once operated on a fish — a Tiger Oskar. He said he added anesthesia to the water, then ran water over the fish’s gills so it could breathe during the operation to remove a tumor from its face.
“I worked in an emergency room out of school, so I’ve seen everything,” he said but added that wildlife and exotics are their own specialties.
His best advice to someone who’s recently lost a pet is to get a new pet as fast as you can. In fact, better advice, he said, is that it’s OK to overlap pets.
“It’s fun to have puppies and kittens around,” he said, adding that your pets want you to be happy, and getting a new one isn’t betraying your old one.
“If you have an older pet, they’ll train the new pet for you,” he said. “They’ll mentor.”
His other advice is to get pet health insurance. There are some pretty good pet policies out there now, he said, mentioning that State Farm offers good pet insurance. So does Trupanion. And for those with a renter’s policy from Lemonade, it’s easy to add on pet health care.
And Olson’s final bit of advice is to feed your dog or cat pet food. Milk isn’t good for your cat and table scraps are necessarily good for your dog.
To book a house call or for in-home hospice care for your dog or cat, visit Dr. Daniel Olson’s website UptownVet.net or call 972-364-7282.
