Business Profile: Yorktown Animal Hospital
Photo credit: Neal Rentz
Briarcliff resident Dr. Philip Raclyn and Croton resident Dr. Steven Kasanofsky have co-owned the Yorktown Animal Hospital since 2002, as well as two animal hospitals in Manhattan. They came to Westchester in response to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and have not regretted their move to open the hospital.
“After 9-11 everybody got a little crazy, including us. We started thinking that if anything happens in Manhattan our businesses would be gone and we couldn’t pay our own personal mortgages,” Raclyn recalled last week. “So we thought maybe we should diversify a little bit, so we decided to buy a practice in Westchester where we lived.”
The building has housed an animal hospital since the 1950’s.
“All veterinarians have different paths to get to where they are,” Raclyn said. “My partner wanted to be a veterinarian since he was about five years old.”
But Raclyn received an undergraduate degree in sociology and did not decide to become a vet until he was 23. “I don’t know how many people ever consider after 27 years they still wake up every day and look forward to going to work. I do and my partner does,” he said. “And I think that’s typical among veterinarians because we have a field that is not only challenging on an intellectual basis, but it’s also incredibly rewarding.”
The Yorktown Animal Hospital provides a wide range of services for dogs and cats, including basic internal medicine, preventive care (including vaccinations), and surgery
Aside from the three animal hospitals the co-owners operate, they have had a mobile veterinary practice since about six months ago. It goes to homes in Westchester and the upper west side of Manhattan.
“We kept on getting calls for it,” Raclyn said. “People just wanted us to come to their houses either because their cats were difficult to get into the box or the dogs were crippled and couldn’t travel. And in the city a lot of dogs are big and they can’t walk too far sometimes if they have ambulatory problems and they can’t get a taxi in New York and most people in New York haven’t got cars. So it was a natural extension of what we’re trying to do.”
The owners and staff of the Yorktown Animal Hospital were recently chosen as a “Best of Westchester” winner in a readers’ poll for Westchester Magazine. “We won the readers’ choice for the best veterinary center in Westchester,” Raclyn said. “We’re very, very proud of it.”
“Honestly, we all think we deserve it because we work extremely hard to make our clients happy and our patients healthy,” Raclyn said/ “Making our patients healthy is our calling. Making our clients happy is a little more difficult some times because people can be very difficult at times, so we try extra hard to make them happy.”
“I think most people who come here get a really family feeling about the place,” Raclyn added.“Why did we win the best in Westchester? We learned a long time ago that you can’t train people to be nice. You can’t train people to be motivated. You can’t train people to be dedicated. So we hire friendly, motivated, dedicated people who love their job and love helping pets and love working with people.”
The Yorktown Animal Hospital is located at 271 Veteran Rd. For more information, call 914-062-3111. The facility is also on Facebook.
