Animal Rescue League veterinarian’s ‘Pet Sounds’

Dr. Erin Doyle, an Animal Rescue League veterinarian, joined Boston Herald Radio’s “Morning Meeting” yesterday for a new monthly segment, “Pet Sounds.”

Q: How did you decide to become a veterinarian?

A: I grew up with a passion for horses and decided from a pretty young age that I wanted to work with animals for the rest of my life, and it wasn’t too long before I kind of fell into veterinary medicine as a goal and I stuck with it .... as I got older kind of my interest in veterinarian medicine changed.

I became less of a horse person and I’ve gotten more into companion animals — cats, dogs, bunch of other small critters that live in our home — but I stuck with it and I love it.

Q: In the last five years you see more and more people through social media really talking about the importance of getting a rescue animal and not going to a pet shop. Is that encouraging to you or do you still find that there are still a ton of people that are still going to pet shops and buying their animals?

A: I think it’s a really lovely trend that has happened in pet ownership.

I’ve been in practice for 12 years and even over those 12 years you see it’s evolving, even just in recent history.

So I think it’s really lovely that people do tend to think adoption first, especially for cats and dogs and I think there’s room for growth in terms of thinking adoption first for other sorts of animals too, like rabbits, guinea pigs, those sorts of things ... we do tend to have lots of rabbits, usually cats, although there’s been improvements and there’s less kind of homeless cats. They’re still out there though.

Usually cats are the most numerous species in the shelter, but every once in a while the rabbits will outnumber the dogs ... It goes back and forth.

Right now the dogs are outnumbering the rabbits, at least in our Boston shelter, but you do tend to see a lot of rabbits that do end up in shelters and I think part of that is that also they tend to stay in the shelters a little longer because people aren’t thinking shelters to get a bunny quite yet.

But it is lovely that people think shelters first often to get a cat or dog.

Q: What’s going on? Why are we seeing all of these random rabbits everywhere in Boston?

A: I’ll be honest, I don’t know 100 percent in terms of the population dynamics of the wild bunnies, but I’d imagine with the weather pattern we’ve had I think it’s a good spring for vegetation too ... I think where the food source goes there goes the bunnies and that is enabling the baby bunnies to do well this spring and survive.