Rose Peters is a veterinarian whose specialty is animal neurology.

I saw alligators and tigers and anators and birds of all kinds.

What did you need to do with an alligator?

Have you ever performed brain surgery on an alligator?

I've not on an alligator.

I bet their brains are very small and hard to get to.

The alligator that I had was, gosh, I think a 12-foot huge alligator that had some general

weakness.

And so they were trying to decide if it had a nerve or a muscle disease.

I think we decided as nerves and muscles were okay.

You're just lazy, you think?

Or just feeling unwell for some other reason, I think, more likely.

Large reptiles especially when they physically don't feel well, can look and feel very weak

and blah and lethargic.

But he wasn't so weak and lethargic that they didn't still have them strapped from head

to toe to a big table and everybody stayed about 10 feet away just in case.

Odds are that you don't have a pet alligator but a pet dog or a cat or guinea pig?

Probably.

Even before the pandemic, pet ownership had been rising fast in the US and now sits at

a record high, 70% of households have at least one pet.

Also at a record high is the share of household income we spend on pets in 2021 that added up

to $123 billion.

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