Finding Best Treatment for Fido : Foundation’s High-Tech Animal Lab Works With Vets

Your cat can’t breathe. Its gums and lips have taken on a deep dark hue--a bluish color. Who do you call? What do you do?

Even if you take the cat to a veterinary clinic, the vet might have trouble saving it. A cat with symptoms of cyanotic coloring is a cat in trouble, according to Mil Custer, a local veterinarian and head of the Animal Care Foundation of San Diego.

What this cat needs right away, Custer said, is oxygen. Getting a cat to don an oxygen mask is no easy matter. That’s where modern technology comes in.

The cat can be placed in an oxygen chamber, while veterinarians render a more complete diagnosis. Unfortunately, only one such chamber exists in the county--at the Emergency Animal Clinic of San Diego, 2317 Hotel Circle South in Mission Valley.

Foundation Created

The Animal Care Foundation was created five years ago through major funding from philanthropist Joan Kroc and a nest of others, Custer said.

The foundation’s main purpose is to fund high-technology instrumentation, like the oxygen chamber, for use at the Emergency Animal Clinic. The use of such equipment, said Custer, has saved the lives of hundreds of animals.

Custer, 63, who recently retired from active practice as a veterinarian, still owns the Turquoise Animal Hospital in Pacific Beach, where he has treated animals since 1959. He moved to San Diego from Ohio and has been a veterinarian for 42 years.

The seven-member board of the Animal Care Foundation wants to make San Diego America’s finest city in treating injured or sick animals, Custer said. To do this, he added, high technology is a must. And to provide high technology, major funding is a must.

The Emergency Animal Clinic now contains $300,000 worth of fluoroscope X-ray equipment; fiber-optic devices (used to remove objects from animals without surgery); the oxygen chamber, and various instruments used to analyze and store blood. There is also a canine blood bank.

Best in Nation

He said the best animal-care facilities in the country are Angell Memorial Animal Hospital in Boston and the Animal Medical Center in New York City. Both have an edge over San Diego’s Emergency Animal Clinic because of history and experience but more significantly because of funding, he said.

“We could use millions,” he said, “but we get along with a budget of less than $100,000 a year.”

Custer said the foundation has resisted membership drives since he feels that up to 70% of what is raised is spent on getting such drives under way (for staffing and promotion).

Custer said the primary difference between the Emergency Animal Clinic of San Diego and the high-tech facilities in Boston and New York is that both of those compete with area veterinarians. San Diego’s works with local animal clinics.

For instance, if a local veterinarian notices cyanotic coloring in the lips of a cat, he can bring in the animal and use the facilities himself. Or, he can refer the animal and have the emergency clinic staff handle the case from start to finish.

Clinic staff includes two ophthalmologists, two surgeons and a dermatologist.

Clinic cases usually pose problems that most private veterinarians can’t handle. An animal with a gastrointestinal obstruction might require both a fluoroscope X-ray and fiber-optic exam.

“We could see if surgery was even necessary,” Custer said.

He said fish hooks have been removed from the stomachs of cats and dogs without surgery. A fiber-optic exam allows a veterinarian the freedom to make such a decision and then to carry the non-surgical procedure, Custer said.

When asked why so much money was necessary for the care of animals, Custer revealed what he called a true and lifelong love of animals.

“Anyone who doesn’t like animals is truly a self-centered person,” he said. “The people I like love animals. People who don’t like animals are in my book less than fine human beings.”

Custer has been involved in campaigns to supply the elderly, the sick and dying and the mentally ill with animals--for protection, comfort, friendship and trust. He believes in the healing powers of animals and said such gifts are especially important in the “lonely, disenfranchised” times that are the 1980s.

He and his wife have an Irish terrier.

“I love that dog,” he said with a misty expression. “I truly do. No other word for it. I would do anything to protect such an animal. These facilities are needed. Animals are important to people, increasingly so in times such as these.”