More Pets Rushed to Emergency During Full Moon, Veterinary School Study Says

Emergency Room doctors for humans often joke about the full moon and how it appears to affect their patient load, but what about animal emergencies? At the Colorado State University's College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, researchers took data for 11,940 animal visits to their veterinary emergency care clinic, and compared them with the phases of the moon. The results were published in the July 15, 2007 issue of the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), an organization with over 75,000 members, which issued an AVMA press release discussing the findings. The title of the published study is "Canine and feline emergency room visits and the lunar cycle: 11,940 cases (1992-2002)." While they cannot explain the phenomenon, it does appear that there is a correlation.

The researchers had noticed that emergency personnel, from the front desk to the veterinarians, would often respond to a busy night by asking if it was a full moon. "There is the belief that things are busier on full-moon nights," they said. According to the AVMA release, when correlating veterinary emergency visits with the phases of the moon closest to full - waxing gibbous, full, and waning gibbous, they discovered that there did seem to be some kind of "full moon effect." The risk of emergencies, they said, was 23 percent greater for cats, and 28 percent for dogs. Emergencies they counted were everything from cardiac arrest to epileptic seizures and trauma.

While they statistically showed an increase in the odds of an emergency that occurred during the fullest phases of the moon, there is nothing in current science that they could call upon to explain it. "It is difficult to interpret the clinical significance of these

findings," the study author was quoted as saying.

The author of the study, Raegan Wells, DVM, noted that this is the first time the subject has been studied. What the researchers were able to present as advice from their work is that awareness of one's pet, through all the phases of the moon, and the environment they live in and dangers that exist, is always a good idea. And although they did not wish to offer an explanation of their results, they did show that it might be prudent to be extra careful during a full moon.

The release from the AVMA notes that their over 75,000 member veterinarians are dedicated to advancing "the science and art of animal, human and public health." As the researchers noted, the study published in this week's journal opens a scientific window into a new area of awareness in human-pet relationships.

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