High-rise cats and teacup dogs: why Hong Kong pet surgery poses unusual challenges for animal doctors
Tiny dogs snapping their toothpick bones, cats with multiple fractures after a fall from a high-rise, snub-nosed dogs with heatstroke – a Hong Kong specialist in veterinary surgery takes us through the operations she most often performs
Hong Kong’s high-rise living and tiny flats pose unusual challenges not only for their human occupants but for their pets.
Of the cats that live several storeys up, a significant number end up victims of what veterinary surgeons call “high-rise syndrome” – multiple injuries caused by falling to the ground from a window ledge or balcony.
Then there are the broken teacups – those tiny miniature dogs so suited to shoebox apartments, but whose limbs snap, in surprisingly predictable ways, when they wriggle out of someone’s arms and fall to the floor.
Hong Kong, and subtropical cities like it, pose a challenge of a different kind for snub-nosed dogs – one that often requires surgical intervention.
People here feel the same way about their pets that others feel about children
Dr Alane Kosanovich Cahalane, specialist in veterinary surgery and CEO of the Veterinary Specialty Hospital (VSH) in Wan Chai, talked the Post through some of the operations she performs more of in Hong Kong than vets elsewhere would expect to tackle.
