At nearly 79, Dr. Arnold Rugg has reached the stage of life where memory arrives unbidden. Not nostalgia exactly—something sharper, more insistent. “Technicolor,” he calls it. Scenes from a childhood spent in the Catskills’ Borscht Belt. The smell of kitchens working at full throttle. The emotional static of a family-run hotel where everyone worked, everyone ate, and no one was ever really off duty. These memories eventually became A Vet’s Life in Dog Years, a multi-volume memoir whose first book traces the making of a healer long before he ever put on a white coat.
Rugg grew up at the Highland Hotel in Ellenville, where his family fed generations of Jewish vacationers escaping the city each summer. Comedy and entertainment may be what the Borscht Belt is remembered for, but for Rugg, it was labor. Constant, multigenerational, all-consuming labor. “It was a machine,” he says. “And you were part of it whether you realized it or not.” Children helped, adults hustled, and the work itself became a kind of informal education—teaching responsibility, endurance, and how to read people quickly.
That early immersion in other people’s needs didn’t stop at the dining room. Rugg describes himself as a shy, observant kid, deeply attuned to the emotional weather around him. His mother, exhausted from cooking at the hotel and worn down by family dynamics, would come home and unload her distress. If his father wasn’t there, it fell to Rugg. “I was a kid,” he says. “But she’d complain to me. And you absorb that.”
Then there was a third-grade teacher—gentle, overwhelmed—who cried in front of her students. When the classroom spiraled, Rugg took her hand to calm her down. He was eight or nine years old. “That sort of sealed the deal,” he says now. “I was an empath. People told me their problems. I carried it.”
At the time, he didn’t see it as anything more than instinct. Only later did he recognize it as the throughline connecting the Catskills kid, the young radical, and the veterinarian he became.
Veterinary medicine, after all, is a profession built on proximity to grief. Rugg, who founded Kingston Animal Hospital, practiced for decades before selling his practice eight years ago, then staying on for four more. The field he entered no longer exists in the same way. Where once there were private practices embedded in their communities, now corporate ownership dominates—often by conglomerates with no local ties. “It’s sad,” he says. “I took care of blue-collar families. I knew them. Now it’s financial first. Treatment decisions get made based on what people can afford.”
That pressure, he believes, is part of why veterinarians have some of the highest suicide rates of any profession. The work requires emotional suppression—grief absorbed, professionalism maintained. “You have to be there for the client,” he says, “but you can’t cross the line. So where does the pain go?” It’s a question he poses directly in the memoir, and one he still doesn’t fully answer. “I think it gets pushed down,” he says. “And that’s dangerous.”
Rugg didn’t plan on becoming a veterinarian. His path was, by his own account, largely accidental. College coincided with political upheaval, antiwar protests, and a sharp ideological turn away from the Ayn Rand–inspired Objectivism he once embraced as a teenager. Marriage brought him and Elaine—his partner since adolescence—to Italy, where he finished a degree in classics and fell hard for the country. A fluke connection through the Italian consulate landed him in veterinary school in Bologna, among the first handful of American students to take that route.
“It wasn’t like I woke up and said, ‘I’m going to be a vet,’” he says. “But once I started, I was into it.” He learned Italian, memorized textbooks, and faced oral exams delivered before panels of professors and rooms full of classmates. He discovered that while he wasn’t naturally dexterous, surgery made sense to him. “When I get inside an abdomen,” he says, “I understand it.”
That satisfaction—working with his hands, fixing what can be fixed—became central to his identity. It’s also where the memoir’s emotional arc resolves. The same kid who tried to calm adults learns how to act decisively in moments of crisis. The empath finds boundaries. Or at least, better ways of carrying the weight.
The first volume of A Vet’s Life in Dog Years ends before the practice years fully unfold. Instead, it lingers where origins live: family, work, love, and the realization—arrived at too late to change—that childhood was shorter than it should have been. “I was working to put food on the table,” Rugg says. “Something was missing.”
What remains is clarity. About where he came from. About why this story needed telling now. And about the strange, unplanned logic of a life shaped by service—first at a hotel, then in exam rooms, always in the presence of other people’s needs.
Dr. Arnold Rugg will be reading from A Vet’s Life in Dog Years on February 18 at 1pm at the Town of Ulster Public Library, 860 Ulster Avenue, Kingston.
