Please note that only our overnight ER Service closed. We still provide urgent and emergency care Monday-Friday, 8am-7pm & Saturday-Sunday, 8am-6pm.

The Ann Arbor Animal Hospital was established in the 1930s as a large animal practice. The current owner, Dr. Griebe, bought the practice in 1982 and at the time the building included both a house and the business. Now seeing only companion animals, the practice kept expanding, eventually taking over and converting the attached house. After outgrowing that space we moved into our new, current building in late 2003 and the old building was demolished. The building as it exists today was constructed as a dedicated veterinary practice, with room for a brand new business: Ann Arbor Animal Hospital Emergency Service, which started seeing patients in mid-2004.

Our ability to handle the most severe veterinary emergencies increased greatly in 2019 when we completed our new state-of-the-art ICU, and again in 2022 by adding a large generator capable of powering the entire hospital in the event of a power outage, ensuring that we could live up to our motto of “Always here, always ready, always caring.”

Unfortunately, employee turnover in veterinary medicine is already much higher than in other health care professions. When our ER lost a few key veterinarians last year, a shortage of doctors meant we were not able to replace them—even though we were constantly recruiting. The loss of these doctors meant that we weren’t able to cover shifts, and we had to reduce our open nights to around half. This put us in a very difficult position. It was slim consolation that we had a lot of company as the shortage of ER DVMs and technicians is national, and there’s no sign of the demand being met any time soon.

The veterinary industry is changing: there are simply not enough people entering the veterinary professions, and too many are getting burned out and leaving for other fields.

Though it came with great reluctance, we’ve made the difficult decision to close our overnight Emergency Service after nearly 19 years. We are extremely grateful to our incredible ER team—some of whom have been with us for more than a decade—for the enormous amount of help and compassion they’ve provided to both pets and people during that time. Our commitment to them remains strong and we are working to bring as many of them as possible over to the primary care and urgent care side of Ann Arbor Animal Hospital.

Our hope is that things will change and we’ll be able to reopen the ER at some point in the future. Until that happens though, the ER’s last night will be Monday, March 13th, and operations will cease at 8AM on March 14th, 2023.

Our Primary Care and Urgent/Critical Care will of course continue on with their normal hours, 8AM-7PM Monday-Friday and 8AM-2PM Saturday-Sunday.

Thank you to all who entrusted their pets to the care of our ER Service for those many years, and all of us at Ann Arbor Animal Hospital look forward to continuing to provide the best care possible to all of our patients going forward!