Haywood Animal Hospital is a locally-owned, full-service animal hospital and surgery center in Hendersonville, NC. We strive to offer the highest quality medicine and surgery for your pets, and we pride ourselves on taking the time to educate you, the pet parent, so that you are always able to make informed decisions.
Haywood Animal Hospital has been part of the Hendersonville community since 1984. We proudly serve Hendersonville, Mills River, Etowah, Flat Rock, Brevard, Arden, Fletcher and other surrounding areas.
Our History
Haywood Animal Hospital was founded by Dr. Chris Coleman and Mickey Coleman in 1984. The original location was just about a half mile down the street from where the current hospital sits, but true to its name, was still on Haywood Road. The current building was previously a pottery studio, housing the kiln in what is now our kennel holding area and also included an apartment where the potter and his wife formerly lived. In 2018, Haywood Animal Hospital was purchased by Dr. Amanda Shoemake and her husband, Erik Shoemake, who have continued to grow it into the exceptional veterinary practice it is today.
It is our mission to care for your pets as if they were our own.
We believe in living this mission every day by providing our clients with medical recommendations that offer gold standard medicine, the same that we as doctors would provide for our own pets. Every day we strive to provide this level of care with lots of love, patience and kindness in each and every visit. Our culture is built on the foundation of team-oriented and family-friendly. We spend a lot of hours together and at times in highly stressful situations. We laugh together, cry together and support one another. We genuinely believe that this allows us to better care for each other, our patients and our clients.
Our Values
-
Collaboration - we have a lot of combined experience, and what’s even better, we often collaborate to bring extra knowledge and experience to each patient and case
-
Family Oriented - we consider ourselves a team and we consider our patients family
-
Compassionate - above anything else, we provide compassion; regardless of your financial abilities, we strive to offer the best medical care that we can to your pet, excelling in compassion toward both our patient and their owner
- Low Stress Handling - while we have to keep our staff safe, the utmost concern is your pet’s safety and wellbeing; we do not push them beyond their comfort level just to get things done and we strive to keep their stress as low as possible
Our Team
Prior to moving to North Carolina in 2018, Dr. Amanda Shoemake was working for a large, privately owned hospital in Memphis, TN with many locations in the area. But after some reflection, she decided that she wanted more for her own family, dreaming for her kids to be involved in the day to day clinic life, and wanting to show them firsthand that you can work hard and still enjoy life. Rooting her family in the Carolinas allowed her to raise her children in a safe area where they could more easily spread their wings and grow up. She and Erik made the difficult decision to leave the familiar, and even their extended family, but they couldn’t be happier with this new life they have carved out and have gained an entire family in the Haywood Animal Hospital team. Western North Carolina has truly fulfilled their dream way of life.
Our team is also blessed to also have been joined by Dr. Patricia Wilfert after deciding to leave Atlanta and move to the mountains to join the family-friendly environment at Haywood Animal Hospital. Prior to joining HAH, Dr. Wilfert worked for two different corporate-owned hospitals over a number of years. She has first hand experience how corporate management views their staff and patients as simply a number, with very little care for them individually.
In 2022, Dr. Chris Jones also joined the Haywood Animal Hospital family. Dr. Jones was practicing veterinary medicine at a hospital which focused on quantity over quality and he was burning out quickly. What he loves most is that with Haywood Animal Hospital, he truly gets to recommend and practice gold standard medicine. He gets to treat his patients the way he feels they deserve to be treated, from a medical standpoint. It’s given him a new passion for this field that we all love.
Many of our staff members have come to Haywood Animal Hospital with little to no prior training. We absolutely love teaching, so a lack of training is never a problem for us. We also feel that personality and passion are so important in our hospital and those are things that you can’t teach. We focus on these attributes first and foremost, and teach the rest!
Come Meet Our Team or check out our Virtual Tour!
What makes us different?
What sets us apart from other veterinary hospitals is how much we care. In the words of Dr. Shoemake, “This practice is mine and Erik’s life. Our kids are growing up here, involved with so much of the day to day. It is my 4th baby, essentially. I want it to succeed in so many ways and I care deeply about our patients and their loving families. It matters to me that they get gold standard medicine v. mediocre treatments. My staff’s mental health matters greatly to me and I worry about them, just as I do any of my relatives.” We strive to always do what is best for our patients. We are able to base our prices on many independent factors within our hospital and community, versus having to follow the “corporate cookie-cutter models”. We are able to offer more in-house pharmacy options, because again, we don’t have a corporation dictating the products and medications we can stock. Our owners and managers get to know the clients and patients as much as the staff does, allowing us to be familiar with what is happening within the hospital at any given time.
We offer the following unique services:
- We see exotics!
- We offer cold laser therapy, which can make a huge difference in so many disease processes
- We offer acupuncture
- We are open Monday through Friday, 7:30am - 5:00pm. We are closed on weekends and major holidays because we deeply care about our staff, their wellness and their time with their own families. We are lucky to have wonderful emergency care accessible in the area for the times that we are not available.
- We do a lot of basic dentistry and surgical dentistry and are passionate about dog and cat teeth. It can make a night and day difference in how a pet feels or acts. We feel strongly that full mouth x-rays should be the standard of care and we perform them during all dental cleaning procedures, at no additional cost.
- We also do a lot of soft tissue surgery and our doctors are exceptionally skilled in current techniques. We can often do procedures that other hospitals may refer to specialists.
- In the case of orthopedic procedures, we have a mobile, board-certified surgeon, who will come into our hospital and perform those procedures. His costs are more affordable than any brick and mortar specialty hospitals in the area.
Community & Philanthropy
We are highly involved with Boxer Butts and Other Mutts. We are beyond fortunate to work with this rescue and provide all of their veterinary care. They are incredible and provide so much for not only our community, but communities for hundreds of miles around. They have been known to raise funds for patients and clients of ours who may be struggling financially to provide the medical care needed for their pet. We are able to give back to the community by offering special discounts to the rescue and providing donations whenever possible. With the help of this rescue, we feel we are able to help so many pets in our own community that would otherwise go without medical care.
Haywood Animal Hospital is nestled in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Hendersonville, North Carolina where hiking trails and nature abound. Hendersonville is known for its apple orchards and every year they host an annual apple festival. We are also known for our bear statues, which are painted each and every year - each one designated for a particular charity and displayed along Main Street from May until October.