Harmony Animal Hospital
Expands Staff & Emergency Veterinary Services

 

Long before the suburbanization of western NJ began, when Harmony Township was but a sleepy town where only the occasional passing car obstructed the view of rolling hills dappled with trees, hedgerows, and cornstalks, Dr. William Epple VMD founded Harmony Animal Hospital. Dr. Epple began the animal hospital with the ideals to provide the highest quality small animal medical care available while also facilitating clients' education of health and wellness for our pets. Since that time in 1973 when Harmony Animal Hospital’s doors first opened to the community and its pets, the area’s pet-owning population has grown tremendously. Harmony Animal Hospital has also developed into a bustling four doctor veterinary practice, changing ownership in 2008 to Dr. William Epple’s son, Dr. Ryan Epple VMD. 

 

Both Dr. Epple’s not only bear a striking resemblance to one another but have also followed a similar path in life.  Both are also graduates of Pennsylvania State University and the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine. Both practiced small animal medicine elsewhere upon graduation before returning to the area of their upbringing.  Most notable is the fact that both father and son have undertaken ambitious endeavors in the success of Harmony Animal Hospital. Recently, Dr. Ryan Epple expanded the hospital’s Veterinary Emergency Services, making it the only small animal veterinary emergency practice in the Phillipsburg/Easton area. Many clients bring their pets from the Bethlehem/Allentown area.

 

Harmony Animal Hospital’s Veterinary Emergency Services (VES) offer 24-hour access to veterinary medical and surgical emergency care every Thursday through Monday, the hours when most local veterinary care facilities are normally closed.  While Veterinary Emergency Services is in its infancy, having been indoctrinated on March 3, 2011, it is the culmination of young Dr Epple’s years of labor and refinement first as an emergency veterinarian in Wilmington, Delaware, and subsequently as a general practitioner offering after hours care since joining Harmony Animal Hospital in 2006. 

 

“My favorite part about emergency care is the ability to make life saving changes to animals in critical situations,” offers Dr. Ryan Epple, who has managed every kind of pet emergency from dogs with twisted stomachs to rats with bleeding skin tumors, cats with string foreign bodies in their intestines to cats that have taken one too many hits of catnip.  “Emergency medicine is interesting because, like general practice, it can be so varied in its patient presentations that you really never know what is going to come through the doors, and in that way it is predictably unpredictable.  We do see some seasonal trends in veterinary emergency medicine, on the other hand, and for example we can prognosticate that every Christmas and Easter we will see several chocolate toxicities, every summer we will treat some heat stroke cases, and every Thanksgiving the turkey and turkey bones always seem to find their way into some pet’s anxiously awaiting GI tract with untoward consequences.”

 

Veterinary Emergency Services is staffed after hours alternately by Dr Ryan Epple and Dr Erin Gannon, who joined the practice in February 2011 and is a 2008 graduate of Ohio State University.  The veterinarians are joined by a host of well trained veterinary technicians who attend to clients and patient care, and the medical resources and knowledge that enable management of the most severely ill dogs, cats, and occasional rats and other small mammal exotics.