'Superhero' pets donate blood to help other animals

Hilary O’Hollaren and Rover, her 10-year-old yellow Labrador, who received a life-saving blood transfusion, at home in Portland, Oregon, the United States, on May 15, 2024. Photos: The New York Times Company

At first, it was hard to tell whether something was really wrong with Rover. The 10-year-old yellow Lab had always been a bit of a loafer, so when he refused to get up from the rug last February, it was not entirely out of character. But then he declined a treat.

“That was when we were like, ‘We have a very sick dog on our hands,’” said Hilary O’Hollaren of Portland, Oregon, the United States.

O’Hollaren’s husband rushed Rover to DoveLewis Veterinary Emergency and Specialty Hospital, where doctors had grave news: The dog had a tumour on his spleen. Worse, it had ruptured, causing massive internal bleeding. Without a blood transfusion, Rover had just hours to live.

The couple quickly gave their consent, and the transfusion bought enough time for further diagnostic testing. The veterinarians discovered that although Rover had an aggressive form of cancer, which would eventually recur, it had not yet metastasised. So they removed Rover’s spleen and sent him home to live out his final months with his family.

“We’re just really so grateful that there was even the option of having that transfusion,” O’Hollaren said. “We’re just trying to make every day the best day ever for him.”

All kinds of ailments – including injuries, infectious diseases, immune conditions and cancer – can leave a pet in desperate need of blood, and transfusion has become an increasingly routine part of veterinary care.

“It is just as important a part of veterinary medicine as it is for human medicine,” said Dr Dana LeVine, a small-animal internist at Auburn University and president of the Association of Veterinary Hematology and Transfusion Medicine.

But animal-blood transfusions require animal blood, which is not always easy to come by. There is no canine Red Cross. Instead, there are hospitals with in-house blood donation colonies, veterinary clinics with a roster of ad hoc donors on call, and a small number of commercial blood banks, with wait lists that can stretch for months. There is also a growing community of pet owners who are signing their animals up to provide blood for other pets in need, which is how DoveLewis found the blood it gave to Rover.

“That some pet family said, ‘Yes, we want to do this,’ just really struck me as a very, very precious and generous gift,” O’Hollaren said.

A canine patient in the intensive care unit at DoveLewis veterinary hospital in Portland, on May 15, 2024.

A brief history

Transfusion medicine may have begun with dogs. The first well-documented, successful transfusion in history took place in 1665, when a British physician used the blood of a healthy dog to revive a dying one. It was a grisly procedure – and not one that was intended to benefit the canine recipient, who had been deliberately bled for the experiment.

Not until the mid-20th century did transfusions become a practical treatment option for sick pets. In those early decades, it tended to be an ad hoc practice, with veterinarians sometimes turning to their own pets or animals that lived at their clinics when blood was needed.

A rapid-test card to identify a cat’s blood type at City Cat Vets in Philadelphia, the United States.

That approach hasn’t entirely disappeared. “There’s a lot of folks that have a cat wandering their hospital who is the in-house donor,” said Dr Karl Jandrey, an emergency and critical care veterinarian at the University of California, Davis.

(Cats and dogs have their own sets of blood types, so places that rely on in-house donors, which tend to be practices that do not often perform transfusions, must ensure recipients are compatible with them.)

Commercial blood banks for animals began emerging in the 1980s. Some rely on “closed colonies”, a group of cats or dogs that live on-site, providing blood for several years before they are put up for adoption.

Closed colonies have been a critical source of animal blood and can be run humanely, experts said. “I know many places that have fabulous cat rooms for cat donors,” said LeVine, who adopted her previous cat, Salt, from a blood donation colony.

But animal welfare activists have also exposed mistreatment and abuse at some commercial blood banks with closed colonies, and demand far outstrips the volume of blood they can provide.

Community canines

These factors have helped fuel interest in an alternate model, which recruits local pets to become regular donors. At DoveLewis, roughly 90 dogs and 40 cats serve as regular donors, or what the hospital calls “superheroes”. And when Rover was discharged, DoveLewis sent him home with one of its custom superhero trading cards, featuring a photo of his donor: Kira, another Lab who loved food and tennis balls.

Community blood banks don’t pay pet owners for blood, but they do offer other perks, which often include free veterinary exams, blood work, and flea and tick preventatives. The animals are rewarded, too. At DoveLewis, donor dogs get a jar of chicken or beef baby food. “It’s just the perfect size jar of smelly meat,” said Kelsey Reinauer, the blood bank director. “And then they get to pick out a toy from our toy bucket.”

After Rover was discharged, O’Hollaren returned to DoveLewis with several bags full of new dog toys for the hospital’s canine donors. “And I made sure I had a can of tennis balls in there for Kira,” she said.

The exact requirements for donating vary by programme, but donors typically need to be completely healthy, relatively young and big enough to spare some blood. (Dogs typically donate about a pint at a time, while cats give less than 2oz/60ml.)

“There’s no specific breed we’re looking for,” said Dr Valerie Latchford, veterinarian and phlebotomist at Blue Ridge Veterinary Blood Bank, a commercial blood bank in Virginia that relies entirely on donations from pet dogs.

“We have everything from dogs that were picked up in shelters, a few of them in other countries, all the way up to, like, the top winning Spinone” – a shaggy, Italian breed – “of all time, show dogs, service dogs.”

One non-negotiable: The dogs must seem comfortable with the staff and the process, able to remain relaxed for the roughly five minutes it requires to draw their blood. “They didn’t sign the forms to come in,” Latchford said. “But they do get to have an opinion on whether they donate or not.”

Nine lives

Cats tend to make for trickier donors. “They don’t just jump on the table and lay down,” said Reinauer of DoveLewis. Feline blood donations often require sedation, which is not a risk-free procedure. For that reason, DoveLewis uses only cats owned by people who work in the veterinary profession. Reinauer’s cat, Apollo, a sturdy Maine coon, is a donor.

Oreo waits to donate blood at the DoveLewis veterinary hospital.

There are places making community cat donation work, including BluePearl Pet Hospital, a chain of more than 100 veterinary hospitals. But its total donor pool includes about 250 cats, compared with some 600 dogs. (The donor pool is not large enough for either species, said Dr Meghan Respess, the national director of blood banking. BluePearl would need to triple that number of donors to provide enough blood for all its hospitals, she said.)

Feline blood can be difficult to obtain, and type B cat blood is an especially “precious commodity”, Jandrey said. Across the United States, fewer than 5% of cats have type B blood, he said. — The New York Times Company/Emily Anthes