Twenty-three years on Springfield Avenue.

"Maplewood Animal Hospital opened on October 6, 2003. The waiting room had four chairs, the surgery suite had one table, and the first appointment was a Boston terrier named Felix with an ear infection. Felix's family still brings their dogs to us."

Dr. Priya's story.

Priya Bhattacharya grew up in Edison, New Jersey, the daughter of a chemistry professor and a small-business accountant. She earned her DVM at Cornell in 2000, followed by a one-year small-animal internship at the University of Pennsylvania and a master's in clinical sciences in 2003. She spent the next three years as an associate at a corporate practice in West Orange.

"I'm grateful for the training," she'll tell you. "I left because I wanted to make my own decisions about how long an appointment took, and I wanted the front-desk team to know clients' names before the second visit."

In the summer of 2003 she bought the brick storefront at 1847 Springfield Avenue with help from her father and a small business loan from a community bank in Newark. The previous tenant had been a hardware store; the floors were unfinished pine and the back room had a furnace from 1962. She renovated the space herself with two contractors and one strong-willed mother-in-law.

The first staff member she hired was Tina Reyes, then a 22-year-old veterinary assistant who had answered a posting on Craigslist. Tina is now the practice manager. She has been at the building for 23 of its 23 years.

Today Dr. Priya sees about 60% of the clinic's appointments. Her clinical interests are internal medicine and feline endocrinology — most of the diabetic cat consults and the difficult chronic-renal cases land on her schedule. Her dog Ravi (an 8-year-old rescue from St. Hubert's) is at the clinic most days, usually under the front desk.

AAHA, Fear Free, and Cat Friendly.

Three accreditations, earned in three different decades, for three different reasons. We start every conversation about them by saying the same thing: each was a working choice. None of them is a marketing logo for us — they're protocols we operate by, and we are inspected to make sure we keep operating by them.

AAHA accreditation came first. We began the process in 2007 and completed our first site survey in 2009. AAHA — the American Animal Hospital Association — is the only accrediting body for small-animal hospitals in the United States. Roughly 12–15% of clinics in the country hold the accreditation. The inspection covers about 900 standards: anesthesia protocols, surgical-suite sterility, controlled-drug logging, medical-record completeness, infection control, staff training, client communication. Inspectors come every three years; the next one is 2026.

AAHA accreditation isn't free. We pay roughly $4,200 annually plus the cost of the every-three-year site survey. We charge slightly more than the unaccredited clinic down the road because of it. We think it's worth it. We understand if you disagree.

Fear Free came next. Dr. Priya completed the individual practitioner certification in 2017, then ran the entire clinical team through the practice-level certification in 2018–2019. Fear Free trains the team to read animal stress signals, to handle low-stress restraint, to use pheromone diffusers, and to pre-medicate patients who arrive anxious. The Cat Friendly Practice designation came in 2020 — that one required physical changes to the building (the separated cat lobby, the cat-only ward in the back) on top of the protocols.

The team grew.

For nine years the practice was Dr. Priya alone. In 2012 she hired Dr. Marcus Chen, a Cornell '11 grad she had met at a Cornell alumni event in Manhattan. Dr. Marcus had been working at a corporate practice in Westchester and was, in his telling, "tired of the dashboard." His clinical interests are dermatology and ophthalmology — the long puzzles, the rashes that have been three months going.

Dr. Sarah Okonkwo joined in 2018 after completing a soft-tissue surgery fellowship at Tufts. She had been a veterinary tech for four years before veterinary school, which gives her a working relationship with the technician team that is hard to teach. She performs the clinic's TPLO cruciate repairs, TECA procedures, abdominal surgeries up through splenectomy, and most of the longer dental cases with extractions.

Dr. Hannah Beckett, the most recent associate, joined in 2022 fresh out of Penn. Her clinical interest is small animal dentistry, and she has built the clinic's dental program into something we are quietly proud of: full-mouth digital radiography on every dental case, treatment-planned extractions, follow-up oral exams included in the cleaning fee. She is also the doctor most likely to know the name of your kid's school.

Eight registered veterinary technicians round out the clinical team. Tina Reyes runs the building. Her two front-desk colleagues, Maria and James, have been with us a combined 18 years.

1847 Springfield Avenue.

The building is a 1924 brick storefront — terra-cotta cornice, transom window over the door, pressed-tin ceiling in the front section that we restored when we moved in. It has been a hardware store, a tailor, a real estate office, and (briefly, in the 1970s) a yoga studio. We renovated it in 2003 with the help of two contractors and one mother-in-law. The original walnut counter at the front desk is the same counter from 2003.

We expanded the surgery suite in 2015. We added the cat-only ward and the separated cat lobby in 2019, as part of the Cat Friendly designation. We added a dedicated dental suite with two tables and a digital dental radiography unit in 2024. The next planned change is replacing the boarding cages with a small day-stay area for senior pets — we'll let you know.

What we don't do.

We're a general-practice hospital with dentistry focus and soft-tissue surgical capability. We don't do board-certified specialty surgery, oncology, or 24-hour critical care. We don't have a CT or MRI machine. We don't have an internal medicine specialist on staff — Dr. Priya handles most of what would otherwise be that role, but for the truly difficult chronic cases we refer to internal medicine specialists.

For specialty referrals we work most often with BluePearl Paramus, Red Bank Veterinary Hospital, and the Veterinary Medical Center at Cornell. For after-hours emergencies we refer to Garden State Veterinary Specialists in Tinton Falls, open 24/7 with board-certified emergency veterinarians. We can usually be reached by phone for advice if you're not sure whether your situation is urgent.