Hi, I am Dr. Roy Kraemer. I am a veterinarian, and for most of my career I have worked almost entirely with one group of dogs: Bulldogs and French Bulldogs.
That is unusual, and people ask me why. The short answer is that this breed does not behave like other dogs. The airway is different, the skin is different, the spine is different, and the anesthetic risk is different. Advice written for dogs in general is often wrong for a bulldog, sometimes dangerously so. I built a practice, a hospital, a website and a product line around that one idea.
Here is how I got there.
Growing up
My father was an attorney who trained at Harvard Law School. My mother was British, with a degree in English literature. Both were city people who moved us out to a rural farming community, which is where I grew up, surrounded by animals.
My first dog, Big
Big was a Golden Retriever, and he was a thief. Specifically, he stole baked goods. He would wait for the neighbors to leave, work their door handle open, let himself in, and eat whatever had just come out of the oven.
He was never caught in the act and never showed the slightest guilt. I learned two things from Big that I still use. Dogs are far more capable than we assume, and the behavior you are annoyed by is usually the behavior somebody accidentally rewarded.
Before veterinary school
I studied biology and animal science, and worked as a research assistant in my university immunology laboratory. That lab is where I learned to ask what the evidence actually shows rather than what everyone repeats. It is a habit I never lost, and you will notice it in how I write about supplements and treatments on this site.
In the summers I ran a nature program for children at a camp in the Berkshires in upstate New York. I taught animal handling and care, ran field trips, and spent a great deal of time explaining animals to people who had never been near one. Explaining medicine to a worried owner is the same skill.
The year before vet school I worked at the racetrack in New York City, had a short stint at the Jockey Club in Manhattan, and spent a few months with an equine veterinary specialist on some of the best horse farms in Virginia and Maryland. Then I moved to Boston and started veterinary school at Tufts University.
After graduation
The East Coast winters did not suit me. I wanted to be outdoors year round, so after graduating I headed west to Southern California and stayed.
Over the years I traveled a good deal, cycling, trekking, skiing, diving and climbing in Africa, Nepal, Brazil, New Zealand and Thailand among other places. I mention it for one reason. Most of what I took from those trips came from talking to people whose lives looked nothing like mine, and that is the part I use every day in an exam room.
Why I ended up working only on bulldogs
It started with the rescues. Local bulldog rescue groups began sending me their hardest cases, the dogs nobody else wanted to take on, and I kept saying yes.
So Cal Bulldog Rescue
We folded rescue work into the practice properly rather than treating it as charity on the side. That meant years of close work with volunteers and my own medical team, on dogs that had come through real abuse and neglect.
Watching those dogs come back, first physically and then in temperament, and then go home with families who wanted them, is the most satisfying work I have done. The volunteers, foster carers and adopters I met through it are still part of my life.
The bulldog specialty hospital
When I said I was going to open a hospital dedicated to Bulldogs and French Bulldogs, I was told the idea was too narrow to survive. I opened it anyway.
The skeptics were wrong. The demand was there and it has never let up, because owners of this breed have been told for years that snorting, overheating and constant skin problems are just what bulldogs do. They are not. Most of it is preventable, and a great deal of it is fixable if you catch it early enough.
vet4bulldog.com
Not every bulldog owner can get to my hospital, so I started publishing. Articles, photographs and videos, all of it aimed at preventing problems rather than reacting once they are established.
Prevention is the whole point of the site. The conditions that shorten a bulldog life, airway collapse, spinal disease, chronic skin and ear infections, all build slowly, and almost all of them announce themselves early. If you know what the early sign looks like, you get to act while acting still counts for something.
V4B bulldog therapeutics
Owners kept asking the same question at the end of an appointment: what can I actually do at home? So I developed a line of non-prescription topicals and supplements to answer it. Every one of them has to pass four tests before I will put my name on it.
- It has to be preventive, not just a patch over a symptom
- It has to be affordable enough to use consistently
- It has to be easy enough that it actually gets done
- It has to be safe for daily use in this breed
I work with specialty manufacturers and I keep revising the formulas. There are new products in development now. You can see the current range in the Vet4Bulldog store, or start with the topical therapy guide.
In the news
I have been asked to comment on Bulldog and French Bulldog health by:
- The US Sun
- Business Insider, on how to keep a French Bulldog healthy
- HuffPost
- NBC Los Angeles, on Diesel the three-legged bulldog
- OC Register, front page, on a dog and owner reunited after four years apart
- Discovery Animal Planet, Pit Bulls and Parolees
- Bulldogger Magazine
If you own a bulldog
Read the condition pages before you need them. That is the honest advice. The owners who do best with this breed are the ones who learned what a pinched nose or an early skin fold infection looks like before it turned into a crisis at ten at night.
If you want a question answered directly, ask me here. If you are local, you can request an appointment. And if you want the prevention reminders as they come round, sign up for the free monthly bully newsletter.
Explore Dr. Kraemer’s V4B Bully Therapeutics →
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