Since graduating from the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Illinois in 1986, Dr. Downing has been blazing her own trail within veterinary medicine, providing state of the art and state of the heart medical care.
Dr. Sarah West is originally from Morro Bay, California. During a family gathering there when she was only five years old, she responded to the proverbial “What do you want to be when you grow up?” with an unequivocal “I’m going to be a vet or a nun.” Good thing she got into veterinary school because she’d have made the world’s worst nun!
Dr. West has had a myriad of species as pets over the years but never has one eclipsed her deep and fundamental love for everything feline. The combination of beauty, power, independence and joy in every cat calls to her and she cannot fathom how anyone would deprive them of their claws especially when educating clients about training and declawing alternatives so closely aligns with a veterinarian’s oath to ‘above all do no harm’. It is her strong opinion that all veterinarians should educate not mutilate.
Dr. West graduated from UC Berkeley in 1989 with a degree in Zoology and UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine in 1994 with her DVM. She completed an internship in Small Animal Medicine and Surgery at Purdue University in 1995 and a Veterinary Radiology Residency at the University of Georgia at Athens in 1998. She has been a board certified veterinary radiologist since 1998 and has run a successful mobile radiology practice, West Radiologic Services, in the San Francisco Bay Area since 2000. She enjoys her daily work with domestic cats as a consultant at local practices as well as her pro bono work with San Francisco Zoo’s wild felids and other species.
Dr. West currently lives in Oakland with her awesome cat-loving husband, Eric Kubly, and her feline overlords, Walle and Squirrel. She is pictured with her true feline forever love, Bubbles Marie, who she lost to congenital renal disease in 2016 after a courageous battle that lasted ten years – a whopping seven years longer than her predicted life expectancy!