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The Man to See About a Cat

A friend of mine in grad school, when excusing himself to go to the men’s room, always said, “I gotta go see a man about a dog.”

Well, I have cats, not a dog, but there comes a time when you have to see a man about a cat, too. Especially when it’s a boy cat, and the boy cat hits that age — roughly six months, roughly 4 kilograms in weight, when he starts spraying and longing to venture forth off your 3rd floor balcony and see what the neighborhood she-cats have to offer.

(And by the way, when a cat sprays on a bean bag chair? Oh, you’re so screwed. I’ve got the bags of replacement stuffing ready to go, but I have to find myself trash bags big enough to hold all the original, territorial-cat-urine-scented styrofoam peas so I can put them out for recycling. I tried the cat-urine-stink remover, which worked wonderfully on my yo (floor mattress), but it was simply impossible to get the stink out of the bean bag stuffing. Sigh. Little bastard.)

Yes, the time came, so soon after realizing he was a boy, to have Peanut fixed.

Peanut mourns his lost 땅공. (Actually, this picture is from months before the operation.)

For those of you following at home, 땅콩 = [lit. Ground Beans, like
de terre is used for potatoes in French] = Peanuts = (euphemistically) Testes (as “nuts” is used in English). Suddenly Peanut’s name, originally a reference to the pet name used by one character for another the TV show Dead Like Me, has taken on a rather ironic punnish resonance.

Now, the normal vets I’d been seeing to get his heartworm meds and vaccinations done, they’re nice folks, the type who take in and treat stray dogs and such, but they’re more of a dog-vet clinic than cat specialists. But Lime managed to find — via the cat enthusiast segment of the Korean internet — the name of a vet who specializes in cats, and happens to have a clinic in Bucheon.

The guy’s name is Kim Do-hyun, and the website for the clinic is here (warning, it’s a damned cyworld page, so there’s a popup and in my Firefox it just gacked out to a login site, so see below for contact info). When I say “specializes in cats” I mean he’s the veterinarian for kitties. Even people in Seoul make the trip out here to see here, and after having Peanut fixed at his clinic, I can see why.

The vets we usually saw until now said that having his testicles removed would be a big affair. They said we’d have to leave Peanut at the clinic for probably three days, and normal practice is to put a kind of guard around the cat’s face to prevent him licking the wound and getting infected.

Well, with Peanut, the procedure was over in five minutes, the stitch that the vet used to close the wound was one he claimed was specially designed to minimize infection and for the thread to be absorbed (no stitch removal). He didn’t put any kind of guard on Peanut’s face to prevent grooming because, as the vet explained, self-grooming is, for a cat, a major source of pleasure and relief in a time of distress. And instead of the operation being a big to-do, Peanut was sent home to recover. Within a couple of hours, he was walking normally, and by the next day he was pretty much back to normal. He’s changed, of course — just a little, behaviorally — but I’m happy to say this procedure doesn’t really seem to have traumatized him any more than the previous trips to get his basic vaccinations did.

Anyway, Dr. Kim is quite well-known online, and well-regarded among cat enthusiasts, as well as a cat-lover himself. I don’t think many Anglophones know about him, though, so I figured I’d post about him here. Hopefully someone who’s looking for a cat specialist in Seoul or Kyeonggi-do will come across this, because Dr. Kim really is the man to see about a cat. And according to his business card, he speaks English, too.

The tiny (ie. contact) details follow: Animal Clinic Be (동물병원 Be) is the name of his clinic. (The letters Be form a picture of a happy cat.) The telephone number is 032-349-7975. Again, the website is here, and the address for the clinic is as follows:

부천밤박동 현대홈타운 입구 세경프라자

That’s somewhere between Yeokgok station and Sosa station, which are two train stops in eastern Bucheon City, out on Line 1 if you’re coming from Seoul or Incheon.

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