The Truth About Pop My Pet's Dr. Grant Dunbar

In case you like reality television and PBS's All Creatures Great and Small, here's your chance to see the grossest parts of the latter in the setting of the former. If you enjoyed the stress of watching James Herriot, the veterinarian on the PBS series, perform surgery to drain the puss from the abscess in that poor cow's neck, be sure to tune in to the new Discovery+ streaming network. Why? So you can see real veterinarians, not actors, perform similar surgeries on truly afflicted animals, all in a one-hour special called Pop My Pet.

The new streaming service offers the best of reality television from channels like Discovery (natch), HGTV, History, Animal Planet, and TLC, which is the home of a similar show, Dr. Pimple Popper. Now they are offering this new special for all those Popaholics who cannot get enough of skin diseases and masses (but on animals instead of people). The one-hour Pop My Pet follows three veterinarians — Dr. Jackie Dueñas, Dr. Cory Creed, and Dr. Grant Dunbar — as they save the lives of animals, from small dogs to great big alligators, with severe skin and health issues like tumors, lumps, and cysts (oh my).

As we get ready for the forthcoming special, available on Discovery+ starting March 1, 2021, let's take a look at the background of one of its featured docs, Dr. Grant Dunbar.

Pop My Pet's handsome young vet, Dr. Grant Dunbar, began his veterinary training at an early age, and took after his father. According to the website for Dr. Dunbar's own practice, Chino Hills Animal Hospital and Pet Resort in Chino, Calif., the good doctor spent "a majority of his time after school and on the weekends at his father's hospital." He also would "[bring] home any stray or abandoned animal that needed a home."

Dr. Dunbar got his formal education at Pomona, California's Western University of Health Sciences, where he received his doctorate degree. His expertise lies in surgery and internal medicine, as well as breeding and reproduction medicine. He received much of that expertise as an intern at Animal Emergency Medical Center in Los Angeles, and then worked as an emergency veterinarian and general practitioner before becoming the practice owner and director of medicine at Chino Hills Animal Hospital and Pet Resort.

On Pop My Pet, Dr. Dunbar will operate on a Maltese dog called Sweet Pea, who has a potentially cancerous "hanging lump that randomly expands and contracts," per the Discovery+ press release. That's a different kind of target, although equally as nasty, than the one James Herriot of PBS's All Creatures Great and Small had, but this one happens to be real.