Wandering Vet

Veterinary housecalls in San Francisco & Marin since 2008. Comprehensive veterinary care for dogs, cats, and small mammals in the comfort of your home

Dr. Behrens graduated from the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine. He spent three years working in Bay Area veterinary hospitals including the SF/SPCA before starting Wandering Vet in 2008. He has volunteered with Veterinary Street Outreach Services, providing free care to the San Francisco homeless population. His interests include internal medicine, geriatric medicine, and the human-animal bond. Dr. Behrens is a New Yorker born into a family of physicians. He grew up in Manhattan with a turtle, Siamese cats, a German Shepherd, and a miniature Poodle. He attended the Horace Mann School in Riverdale, where he became interested in computers, before finishing high school at The Putney School — a boarding school in Vermont where all students tend to a working barn. He came to California to study Cognitive Science at UC Santa Cruz, drawn by a dream of working for Apple Computer. After graduating he joined Claris Corporation in technical support, where he learned a great deal about customer service and communication, before moving into Software Engineering. After six years he returned to New York and worked as a director of engineering at several early internet startups — one had a book written about it, two went public, and one quietly fizzled out. While in New York he rescued a cat and her litter of kittens from a basement in Queens. Having lost his passion for the tech industry, he began volunteering as a technician with a housecall veterinarian in Manhattan. He met people who treated their pets as true members of the family — people who believed their animals deserved the very best care. That experience planted the seed. Determined to become a veterinarian, he returned to school at NYU to complete the basic sciences, then moved to a farm near UC Davis to finish his pre-veterinary coursework and work in radiology and the equine NICU. He was offered admission to multiple schools and chose the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, where he explored an interest in horses and graduated ready for mixed mobile practice. Having gotten married, he moved back to San Francisco with his wife Elle and their two cats, Buster and Pascal. The city left few horses to treat, so he focused on small animals — spending three years providing general, emergency, and surgical care before founding Wandering Vet in 2008

Mission — "The opportunity to help people and their pets, in the comfort of their own home, is the reason I became a veterinarian."