When the staff at Cedar Pet Clinic in Lake Elmo asked John Baillie for a few final words of wisdom before his last day on the job Thursday morning, the veterinarian was already thinking about one of his upcoming cases.
“I think we should start with an ImmunoRegulin for Torey,” Baillie said, referring to an immunomodulatory injection for Linda Stratig’s Lynx Point cat.
At the end of the day, after treating more than a dozen different pets, Baillie was asked again if he had any words of wisdom for the staff before retiring after 52 years as a veterinarian.
“I hope you enjoy it as long as you like, as I do,” Baillie said, raising a champagne flute in a toast. “To all of you: the best staff I have ever had.”
For Baillie, 76, of St. Paul, who started treating animals, reptiles and birds in the Twin Cities in 1972, the decision to retire was “bittersweet,” he said. “I got enough signals that it was probably for the best, and I’m leaving it in really good hands, and that certainly helps.”
His practice included dogs, cats, birds, rabbits, gerbils, hamsters, hedgehogs, turtles, rats and mice, chinchillas, ferrets, guinea pigs, chickens, ducks and geese, snakes, iguanas, chameleons, frogs and sugar gliders, emus, peacocks and pot-bellied pigs .
His philosophy was, “If it fits through the front door, we’ll run with it,” he said.
Examples: He once performed a C-section on a 15-foot boa constrictor, launched and cleaned an abscess on an elephant, and treated a tarantula for a respiratory disease. He once had a horse dislocate his shoulder; he contracted psittacosis, a rare infectious disease, from a parrot; and was clawed by a tiger.
Because Baillie handled such a wide variety of animals, he was never bored.
“It’s always been interesting,” he said. “I never knew what was going to happen next. It’s very different from a dog-and-cat practice. If you only saw dogs and cats, you’d see similar problems all day long. I never had any idea what I was going to see and what I was going to do. It’s been quite a career.”
On Thursday, his duties included performing acupuncture on five cats, a Clumber Spaniel named Aspen and a guinea pig named Pony; vaccinating a 14-year-old Bichon Frise named Cabo San Lucas and performing a checkup on a 30-pound, 12-week-old Bernese Mountain Dog.
Aspen’s owner, Jayde Dian of Somerset, Wisconsin, is a certified veterinary technician at Cedar Pet Clinic. She and a number of other employees brought their pets to work on Thursday for final treatments by Baillie.
“Aspen gets more needles than any of my other patients right now, just because she has multiple areas that are involved,” Baillie said. “She likes it. She gets petted. Life is good for her. That’s just the personality of this dog. It’s, ‘Oh, good. I get petted. I don’t care what else you do to me.'”
Baillie’s clients come from all over the state to receive treatment.
“I have a couple of rabbits in Rochester that I see,” he said. “I have a bird that comes in from Sioux Falls once a year, and a bird that comes in from Iowa once a year. I have a couple of patients that I see pretty regularly from Fargo.”
Baillie, who grew up in Roseville, decided he wanted to become a veterinarian at age 14. He graduated from the University of Minnesota College of Veterinary Science in 1972.
After working for a year at a clinic in Eagan, he and a partner founded the Cedar Pet Clinic in South Minneapolis in 1973.
“When we started the clinic, we wrote a letter to all 100 clinics in the five-county area and said if people had clients with birds, we would see them,” he told the Pioneer Press in 2022. “I think every vet at those clinics said, ‘Hmmmm. When they see birds, they see everything, and that’s what happened.'”
Cedar Pet Clinic expanded to Lake Elmo in 1996 after Baillie and his wife, Margaret “Peg” Guilfoyle, who lived in Grant, decided it was time to find a practice closer to home. Guilfoyle found a building in Lake Elmo, near the Lake Elmo Inn, and Baillie began practicing two days a week in Minneapolis and two days a week in Lake Elmo. Cedar Pet Clinic moved to its current location on Stillwater Boulevard in 2006; Baillie sold his interest in the Minneapolis clinic in 2005, but remained in practice there until 2007.
Baillie started reducing the number of days at work a few years ago, and since the beginning of this year he has been working one day a week.
As news of his impending retirement spread in recent months, clients like Tim Buske began making arrangements for the last time Baillie would see their pets. Buske, who lives in Brooklyn Center, brought Noah, his Goffin’s cockatoo, last week. Noah has been treated by Baillie for 31 years, Buske said.
Baillie was always willing to go the extra mile when it came to Noah, Buske said. “One day, about 10 years ago, Noah got really sick, and Dr. Baillie was on vacation on the North Shore,” he said. “I called and they said, ‘We’ll try to get a hold of Dr. Baillie, and he can help us treat him. In the meantime, he’s coming back home to take care of him.’ He cut his vacation short because of a sick bird.”
Noah scared other vets, but Baillie never backed down when she treated him, Buske said.
“The first time Dr. Baillie treated him, he reached right into the cage and got him out with his bare hands,” Buske said. “I call him the real Dr. Doolittle. That’s how he is with every animal. We’re going to miss him. We’re really lucky. Noah wouldn’t have survived what happened 10 years ago if it wasn’t for Dr. Baillie.”
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Baillie is a past president of the Minnesota Veterinary Medical Association and was named the state veterinarian of the year in 2016. He has served as a tenured lecturer at the University of Minnesota School of Veterinary Medicine, for the Minnesota Medical Association, and other organizations.
In honor of his retirement, the Minnesota Veterinary Medical Foundation is appointing a Dr. John Baillie Exotic Pets Scholarship op.
Veterinarian Kirstin Keller succeeds Baillie as medical director of Cedar Pet Clinic. Keller worked at Cedar as a support staff from 2006 to 2010 before earning her doctorate in veterinary medicine and returning as a physician in 2014.
The clinic’s leadership team also includes Sue Walter, a certified chief veterinary technician, who has been with Baillie since 1987. Baillie’s daughter, Maggie Baillie, will also remain as the hospital’s manager. She has worked for Cedar on and off since she was 14.
“It’s such a special place,” Maggie Baillie said. “No other work environment compares to this. ‘Doc’ — that’s what we call him — has touched the lives of thousands of people and their pets over the years. We were all fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with him.”
Baillie and his wife Peg plan to spend part of their retirement aboard Blue Boat Home, their 25-foot Ranger Tug.
“It is a sleeper boat and can be transported on a trailer,” he said. “It’s like a mobile cabin. We plan to ship it to Lake Michigan and spend six to seven weeks on Lake Michigan. We get visits from family and see some other friends along the way.”
Baillie, who owns a gray tabby cat from the shelter named Wheezy, says he is still fascinated by the intelligence of animals.
“They understand a lot of commands,” he said. “They understand what you want them to do. Most of our dogs, their purpose in life is to please us. The more they understand us, the happier we are, and people can interpret that however they want.
“You know, cats wake up in the morning and wonder, ‘Where are the servants with my food?’ The dogs wake up in the morning and wonder, “Where are the gods with my food?” The cats think: ‘Why should I learn anything? They’re going to take care of me anyway.'”
IF YOU GO
A party honoring John Baillie, the longtime veterinarian and owner of Cedar Pet Clinic in Lake Elmo, will be held Saturday from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Lake Elmo Inn Event Center. Customers and community members are invited. Refreshments will be served.
