Only the best for local pets

Grant Park

West Winnipeg

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This article was published 08/01/2025 (499 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Finding a way to blend the best of traditional approaches with constantly evolving new technologies is a real challenge for innovators looking to provide clients with exceptional service.

But a trio of veterinarians from the Grant Park Animal Hospital seem to have figured out a way.

Dr. Jonas Watson and partners Dr. Chris Bell and Dr. Tim Kraemer have always been dedicated to client-centred and community-focused veterinary care. Their clinic on Taylor Avenue provides services for pets in the city of Winnipeg, surrounding communities in southern Manitoba, and several remote northern communities.

The hospital offers basic veterinary medical and surgical services, as well as specialties such as ultrasound, canine sports medicine, dentistry, oncology, exotic animal medicine and a unique aquatic/fish medicine service. Now, the hospital is also equipped with a brand-new, human-grade CT scanner, the only one of its kind in the province.

Typical wait times for pet CT scans are about a week, and six to eight scans can be done in a day. Reports are provided by board-certified vet radiologists within 24 to 48 hours.

“It’s very exciting,” Watson said. “We feel we are at the forefront of something in the city. Because it requires a patient to be motionless, they are either sedated or anesthetized, and the procedure is very quick. With certain kinds of diagnoses, we were left making presumptions. Now we are able to see with some certainty.”

Watson said the technology allows imaging to be completed in under a minute.

The equipment helps diagnose varied pathologies and provides surgeons with more information to prepare for procedures, for staging diseases such as cancer, and to know how far illnesses have progressed.

“It’s really revolutionizing when it comes to diagnosing bone problems,” Bell said. “If we have something like a mass near a joint or look at the spine or inside the chest, or find a mass in one lung versus the other lung… the CT is one of the ways to generate a full, three-dimensional image of the patient. With dogs or cats that have an abdominal mass, an ultrasound can’t always see all around it. With the CT scanner we can fully visualize the area and that allows for a much more accurate and immediate diagnosis,” he explained.

“We’ve been getting many referrals from colleagues across the city,” Watson said. “We’ve even done scans of residents of the Assiniboine Park Zoo. We are up and ready to go.”

After going their separate ways upon graduation from veterinary college almost 20 years ago, the former classmates began contemplating the idea of opening a privately vet-owned hospital in Winnipeg with a community focus.

“There’s a bit of a corporate trend of buying out hospitals,” said Watson, a consultant for numerous animal welfare organizations who is recognized locally and internationally for his efforts to improve animal health and well-being. In 2019, he was the recipient of the World Veterinary Association’s Global Animal Welfare award for Canada. He lives with two dogs (one saved from the dog meat trade in Thailand), and a geriatric 22-year-old cat.

Determined to practise their guiding philosophy of treating patients and clients exactly as they’d hope to be treated, they found themselves opening the new facility in the middle of the pandemic.

“People ran out in droves to get pets,” Watson said of the first part of this decade. “It did keep us busy. We’ve really been enjoying ourselves, making lots of good relationships with pet owners, doing different kinds of work.”

Bell works as an equine surgeon and now also contributes to the work of Grant Park Animal Hospital. As the designated professional applying sports medicine to dogs and cats, he’s grateful to be part of the staff.

“There’s a really great synergy of experience,” Bell said of the combined expertise of the three vets. “It’s been really fantastic, with our core values for community dear to our hearts. We didn’t know what was going to happen during the pandemic. We either pull the pin or keep going forward.

“We believed in our team. It’s an amazing practice; we’ve had to expand, more than double our space,” explained Bell, whose own busy household includes a horse, a great Dane, some fish, a snake and a lizard.

“The CT scanner is kind of a crown jewel of our expansion,” Watson continued. “We are very pleased to be one of Manitoba’s largest and most modern animal hospitals. There’s something about the work we do that seems to be resonating with the public.”