A light bulb, a diamond ring, a toupee, and a garden hose — they’ve all been removed from the stomachs of animals by Dr. Eugene Gorodetsky.
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My Pet Ate What!?
When: Jan. 26 at 6 p.m.
Where: CTV Wild Channel (free preview available now until Feb. 28)
What do a light bulb, a diamond ring, a toupee, and a garden hose have in common?
They’ve all been removed from the stomachs of animals by Dr. Eugene Gorodetsky.
One of the only full-time animal endoscopists in the world, Gorodetsky’s days are filled with tending to pets throughout the province who have misjudged the capabilities of their digestive systems, sometimes to life-threatening effect. Now the public can enjoy the adventures of Gorodetsky in the new 14-episode series, My Pet Ate What!?
The show is the brainchild of the expert endoscopist’s son Ben, an Ontario-based reality-TV producer.
“I can’t say that I was overly excited,” the vet said of his son’s idea to film him at work.
“Prior to this I hadn’t watched one hour of reality TV in my life, so I am certainly no expert on it. But I just wasn’t sure how interesting my work would be to a general audience. Nor was I certain as to how much time it would take out of my day.”
But, once his wife talked him into it, the vet was surprised at how efficient the filming was.
“It wasn’t bad as far as time management goes,” he said. “The team really got the hang of it, and after the initial couple of weeks, it worked out quite well, better than I expected.”
And the series makes for suspenseful viewing, although watching Gorodetsky remove a tennis ball from an anesthetized black lab’s stomach, her tongue lolling out of her mouth, is not an appetite stimulant.
His son spent a summer following his dad around, capturing pets at their worst.
“The pace was unbelievable,” the younger Gorodetsky said.
“Because Eugene doesn’t have a clinic or a home base, he’s like this road dog, driving or flying or taking a ferry all over the place all the time. So we were faced with a new setting every single day, sometimes multiple times a day. We had to adapt to a new place with new physical dimensions all the time, and staff who never got a chance to get used to us being around.
“And it’s really fast. Eugene will get a call and they’ll say, ‘How soon can you be here?’ And he says, ‘In an hour.’ And then it’s our job to immediately put into motion 20 processes.”
Each episode features a couple of tales and tails, including a Bernese Mountain Dog with a taste for intimate apparel to a cat who samples shiny treats from its owner’s wallet.
Ben spent and his crew spent four months following his dad from one pet emergency to another. One of the most memorable experiences was watching Gorodetsky remove a fish hook from a dog.
“It looked like a disco ball with knives attached to it. You see it on the screen and right away you know that it doesn’t belong in a stomach. And then getting to watch my dad be just so immaculate with finding it in this mess of dog food in the stomach, and then extracting it with no damage, that was a highlight.”
Another highlight was seeing the effect that the vet’s work had on pet owners.
“So often the story was, ‘I knew something was wrong because she was low energy, she was sad, the spark had gone from her eyes, and I knew something was really bad, and I had to do something quick.’ And then to see the owners after the pet comes out of the anesthetic, when they’re a little bit loopy but they’re not sick anymore, they’re not obstructed, they’re not hurting — that was heart-melting.”