This book is to share and inform real-life experiences of a veterinary practitioner. I tell real stories of my pre-veterinary and veterinary career in the Smokey Mountains / Appalachian / East Tennessee area. Maybe too graphic for some, it is the way it has been for me as I pursued this career. I hope and intend to share heartwarming and interesting stories of people and animals-domestic and exotic. I now know the importance of the animal kingdom to us. It is simply ecological history! Our interaction with them and theirs to us can be humorous, loving, sad, traumatic, and educational-well, you know what I mean! Some of these stories are not only recording what I have experienced, but recording the history of people and animals of this area that may be lost otherwise, i.e., stories that involve coon hunting, family survival dependent on their animals, weird predicaments animals get themselves into, weird predicaments we get into treating them medically and surgically. There are even stories which would be lost if I didn't get it down on paper, like dumping outhouses in the middle of town on Halloween as good mischievous fun, murder stories deep in the mountains, to surfing on a pig's back! Snakes, coatimundis, black panthers, lemurs, cockatoos, turtles, ferrets, deer, goats, puppies, kittens, calves, foals, piglets, kids (goat and human!), raccoons, possums, tigers, potbelly pigs, flying squirrel orphans, blind dogs, deaf dogs, three-legged cats, mean mares, killer cows, spoiled iguanas, sick fish, house fire victims, abused animals, orphans-let's breathe. How funny! This menagerie of a living circus on planet earth is so abundant that it is impossible to get it down on paper or cyber. However, this is my attempt to tell you as much as I can about my veterinary experiences-funny or sad! I intend for this to be entertaining and hopefully informative, too. Through joy, pain, and suffering we learn, and we learn more and more in our interaction with our animal cousins how important we are to each other. live to learn-learn to live. LOVE TO LEARN- LEARN TO LOVE