By Kristan Schiller

Dr. Evan Morse [Photo Credit: Mary Alice Valvoda]

If you saw dogs and cats doing a jig across the city of Warrensville Heights last Sunday, they were likely celebrating the 50^th anniversary of the opening of Warrensville Animal Hospital.

On June 5, 1972, Dr. Evan Morse planted his veterinary flag at 4003 Warrensville Center Road just north of Harvard Avenue.  With his warm smile, easy-going manner and animal knowledge, Morse has been making tails wag at that location ever since.

Dr. Morse’s generosity and compassion for animals seems to have been ingrained in him since childhood. 

“As a kid growing up with my parents and two sisters in a third-floor apartment in Richmond, Virginia that didn’t allow pets, I would head out into the woods, swamps and fields while my school friends would head for the tennis courts, playgrounds and baseball diamonds,” he recalls. He would return home in the afternoon with an ever-changing roster of forlorn critters ranging from salamanders, frogs and snakes to chipmunks, squirrels and rabbits to robins, blue jays, and mockingbirds.

He was eventually dubbed ‘Nature Boy’, a nickname he still owns with delight.

One of the first black veterinarians in Ohio, the Tuskegee-educated Morse could not join the Cleveland Academy of Veterinary Medicine for years due to racial bias in the industry. Finally, he was permitted to join and twenty years later, he became president of the organization.  

Now beloved in the community, and recipient of the Ohio Veterinary Medical Association Distinguished Service Award, Morse’s animal hospital has provided top-notch veterinary services to the community and its pets for almost five decades. He has also given veterinary care to the Warrensville Heights animal control officers, the city’s kennel, and its police dogs at no cost.

Asked to reflect on his half-century of service to the community, Morse offered this reminiscence:

“A young man just came into my office and told me of how his grandmother and his mother would come here to Warrensville Animal Hospital with their pets before he could walk, carrying him in tow when they’d visit me. And now, here he is with his puppy.  It warms my heart to know that generations of families uphold and support not only the care I give their animals but me as a person and the 50 years of love I have put into my profession. It gives my life a richness beyond compare.”

We’ll add a “Woof, Woof” to that!

The Warrensville Animal Hospital over the past 50 years.

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