Long before the in-demand veterinary doctor has reached the front door, Katya’s pretty face has already crumpled into a mound of wrinkles and fangs. Her consternation is obvious–does she fight or flee? Velhagen steps into the house and the panic-stricken Labrador snarls hesitantly, slowly building up to a guttural growl. As the vet comes ever closer, Katya lets loose a volley of staccato barks that reaches a hostile crescendo until slumping into a plaintive howl. Unperturbed, Velhagen kneels beside her. After a series of coos, woos, thattagirl’s, and gentle strokes of his hand, Katya is placated. Once more, to the now monthly astonishment of her owner, Katya has been seduced into meekly consenting to her heartworm shots.
As a child, Mike Velhagen took care of turtles, cats, rabbits, dogs, and even the odd (aren’t they all?) monkey. "I don’t really remember where that monkey came from. I think a maid brought it in from the province and I started taking care of it. I had to get rid of it because it was extremely jealous–it was a female monkey and was really attached to me. Every time a girl would come near me it would get jealous and attack her. But it never attacked any of my male friends," he says, perhaps justifying why he spent more time shooting hoops with the boys instead of bringing girlfriends home to meet mom and dad.
His first dog was a mixed cocker spaniel poodle, a perilous cross that fortunately did not result in a petulant furball with skinny legs. The dog lived for 16 years (George Burnsesque in human years)–long enough for Velhagen to realize he was allergic to animals. "I was asthmatic and even up to now I haven’t outgrown my asthma. I’m not really supposed to be around animals but it’s sort of like a calling to me, to be with them and treat them," he says.
The story of how Velhagen ended up a doctor of veterinary medicine is as implausible as a Skippy the Bush Kangaroo adventure (G’day, Skip. Could you swing by later and defuse this neutron bomb?), with as many bizarre skips and hops as any of the marsupial’s episodes, which were conceivably written under the influence of the aboriginal version of a peyote cactus high.
I’ve always wanted to be a vet," Velhagen says. "The things is, in high school we had this career orientation thing and the first persons I told this to laughed at me. There was no career in it, they said, and that traumatized me. So I didn’t tell anybody else, not even my parents."
After high school, Velhagen, displaying a jungle cat’s cunning, told his parents he had enrolled in a business course at the University of La Salle. Inevitably, his charade was uncovered after a year–he had not attended a single class; in truth, he had never enrolled in the first place. Velhagen explained his preferred career choice to his father, who grasped the wisdom of allowing his son to pursue his true passion.
"Next thing I did was enroll in UP Diliman for Veterinary Medicine," Velhagen says. "After two years there, the college transferred to UP Los Baños. I stayed there for just a semester because I was allergic to the pollen there. I would get asthma everyday and hardly went to school. I was about ready to give up veterinary medicine when a friend of my brother told me he was studying vet med at Araneta University. The next day I went there and enrolled."
It took Velhagen seven years to graduate from the time he transferred to UP Los Baños in 1985. In between, he entered the lucrative enterprise of exporting Palawan lobsters to Japan. Perhaps it was because his Japanese partners left him without a sayonara, or maybe it was the three years of staring at dim, unblinking lobster eyes that reminded him how much more satisfying it was working with non-crustaceans–Velhagen went back to school to finish his thesis.
"For my thesis, I analyzed the nutritional content of various brands of frozen dog food to see if they met the daily nutritional requirement of growing, adult and senior dogs. Apparently, most of them were not. They had some protein, carbohydrate, and fat in it but it wasn’t a balanced meal. Most of them had too high a mineral content. I wouldn’t recommend giving frozen dog food to your dog," he says.
After another three-year interlude managing a band, Velhagen finally admitted to himself that "sayang lang everything I studied for." He seized an opportunity to work at Mt. Pleasant Animal Hospital in Singapore. "It was a great experience because one month there is equivalent to one year’s worth of experience here in the Philippines. Sometimes, we would have a hundred clients a day with around 15 to 20 operations. It’s really busy there and it taught me a lot."
Deciding not to renew his contract, Velhagen came back to the Philippines to start his practice. "I didn’t have a place yet to put up a clinic so I had no choice but to do house calls," explaining the origin of a service that has made him so popular. "It turned out that doing house calls was more convenient for my clients because you don’t have to fight the traffic to bring your dog and you don’t have to risk your dog pooing or peeing inside your car. In the beginning, I would have just one or two clients a week. Eventually, it grew and today I do around 15 to 20 calls a day. It was word of mouth, I didn’t advertise. I first started treating the pets of relatives and then they referred me. Five years later, I have more or less 500 clients and already have appointments until the end of 2002."
Burly, with a five-o’clock shadow that even electrolysis is unlikely to tame, Velhagen is far from your bespectacled, absent-minded old vet. But the man clearly has a gift with animals–he adores them and they eventually reciprocate. Besides, what can you say about someone who stops his pickup in the middle of the road–in traffic–to pick up a cat that’s crossing the street?
"Usually, I pick up kittens who are not really too wary of people, or sick ones that are too weak to run away," he says. "I rehabilitate them and then I look for potential owners who will adopt them. It’s very hard–right now, I have ten, and often, I don’t want to give them away anymore. I’d rather keep them because I know they will be taken care of better with me. So far, I’ve only re-homed three of them while the rest are still with me." The word about the gallery of cats in his clinic has obviously spread–addicts have visited him with a view to purchasing ketamine (special k to lunatic ravers, who use the veterinary general anesthetic for its LSD-like hallucinatory effects).
One notable vagabond found by a friend under a Manila bridge is Robert, a purebred Persian cat. Velhagen nursed him back to health from a bad case of mange. Today, Robert is as fluffy as a goose down pillow and his timidity has been replaced by the haughty indifference of a prince. Another of Velhagen’s pets is Diane the bulldog. A mysterious paralysis has struck the poor dog; she now has to pull herself forward with her front legs (an especially pitiful sight) although Velhagen aids her mobility by carrying her around, no small feat as Diane is an exceedingly healthy dog. Spike is the vet’s finicky baby python that is fed a weekly chick diet. While Spike doesn’t much care what stock the young chickadees hail from, he absolutely insists they be presented to him alive–after all, a constriction a day keeps the vet away.
Velhagen has lost count of the number of times he’s been bitten in the course of his veterinary career. "I was once bitten badly in the face by a German shepherd and that needed surgery. It was more a nervous bite by the dog and it bore a hole in my upper lip. Aside from that, I’ve been bitten a lot of times but none of them were serious–they all healed in time. Ideally, I’m supposed to get my rabies shots once a year," he says.
There is no shortage of-out-of-the-ordinary pet procedures performed by Velhagen. He has assisted at a surgery on a Singapore Zoo wolf that had broken its leg. He once even administered anesthesia for a hornbill’s bill transplant. "The bill snapped off when the handler tried to open the mouth too forcefully. An American dentist created an artificial beak made of the dental materials used to make dentures, making a mold that would match the original bill. We screwed the new bill to the lower jaw. The operation was successful–the bird is doing very well and it can now catch grapes and other fruits thrown at it with its beak," he says. Presumably, the lucky hornbill can now squawk with the best of them, and is no longer ridiculed by his feathered friends for the daft whooshing sound his beakless mouth used to emit.
Velhagen relates how some pet owners shower their babies with an extravagance usually reserved for buxom blondes being chased by old and lonely millionaires. One client owns 90 cats and spends a small fortune monthly on kitty litters, cat food, and, of course, veterinary bills. Another client set up a trust fund under his dog’s name; the well-fixed woofer can now spend his idle days watching DVDs of Lassie reruns on his state-of-the-art home entertainment center.
In the US, pets are prescribed Prozac for their psychological ailments. Some say, though, it is unfair to animals–or at least unrealistic–to attribute to them human emotions. Velhagen disagrees, courtesy of some poignant empirical evidence. "I believe they can feel," he says. "I had a dog, her name was Brooke, that I really believe died of a broken heart. She was my constant companion for nearly eight years then I left for Singapore. The day I left, she didn’t eat anymore and would cry at night. She looked for me and slowly died. I felt so guilty."
To rephrase Mark Twain, if you pick up a starving animal and make it prosperous, it will not bite you–this is the principal difference between an animal and a man. Dr. Mike Velhagen’s personal reflections on the joys of pet ownership are far less cynical: "Seeing your dog or your cat greet you after you’ve come through the door after a hard day’s work makes you forget everything because this living thing is showing you unconditional love. You learn from that. Pets give you more than just company. I have a three-legged cat that doesn’t act like it has a disability. Any disability we think we have can be overcome if we just think like animals. They teach you lessons in life–being loyal, being persevering, and overcoming any shortcomings."