Betty White Takes On Pet Cancer

If there was ever an 88-year-old who deserved her own action figure, it's Betty White. Among her many achievements as an actress, she made history a week ago when she hosted Saturday Night Live. But she's been changing the game for animals much longer than that. 

Betty has been a trustee at the Morris Animal Foundation for more than four decades, funding numerous critical studies that have led to advances ranging from stronger legal protections for California sea otters to better pain management for cats, dogs, and horses. A couple months ago, she teamed up with Sir Elton John to fund new research on leptospirosis, a potentially fatal and increasingly common canine disease. She also recently pledged a matching donation of $25,000 to her eponymous Betty White Wildlife Rapid Response Fund, created by Morris Animal Foundation in March (little did they know how badly it would be needed so soon.)

Now, Betty White has teamed up with Petco and the pet food company Blue Buffalo to fight cancer. In honor of Pet Cancer Awareness Month, they released a PSA starring Betty in the hopes of raising $1 million for pet cancer research with the Morris Animal Foundation. If the words "animal" and "research" in the same sentence make you squeamish, don't worry — Morris Animal Foundation funding goes toward humane animal health studies.

Cancer is the number one disease-related cause of death in pets. One in four dogs will die of cancer, and it will take the lives of more than 50 percent of dogs over the age of ten. Just like in humans, cancer can occur anywhere in an animal's body and the causes are largely unknown. The hope is not only that research can find the cause and cure for cancer, but in the short-term, that it can help people better identify the signs of cancer in their pets so they can be treated early and, therefore, more successfully. 

As part of the campaign, Petco has set up a Pet Cancer Awareness Virtual Memorial Wall where people can share their stories to raise awareness and help others learn how to spot cancer in their pets. Unfortunately, I can relate to them a little too well — in the past two years, I've had five animals struck with cancer.

I could go on for days about each of them, but in brief: Olive was the first of my pack to be diagnosed, in 2008, a textbook candidate for mammary cancer. She was a resilient little pit bull who had been rescued from a cruelty case as an older dog, so she hadn't been spayed until she was about ten. Our best guess is that she was about fifteen when the first tumor was found and removed. She stuck around, happy and healthy, for about a year and a half before the cancer won. During that time, my youngest cat, Wild Bill, was struck with lymphoma. He was an unforgettable cat who lived up to his name, so when he suddenly slowed down one day, so I took him to the vet. After a thorough exam, all the signs pointed to a urinary infection. When the antibiotics didn't work, we discovered that he had a tumor hiding in his intestines and a week (and several vet specialist appointments) later, he was gone.

Last year, I found a tumor on my older shepherd's leg, yet another kind of cancer. Juno's soft-tissue sarcoma was successfully treated by an oncological surgeon and she's back to her spry, bossy self around the house. A few months after her surgery, my other male cat, Jebby, began losing weight. He was neither small nor shy, so the loss of appetite and increasing isolation were obvious. However, it took several tests to pinpoint that he had an untreatable form of carcinoma, and he died only a couple of months later. The most recent case is my younger shepherd, only 8-years-old, who was diagnosed with lymphoma about a month ago. Her only symptoms were mild weight loss (which isn't unusual as a dog enters her senior year) and an upset stomach. She's currently undergoing chemotherapy and, so far, seems to be responding well. But there's no way to know if we're buying months or years.

So, yeah, this is personal. I love Betty White as an actress, but I have an ulterior motive in hoping that she stays in the limelight for a long, long time. Betty White has often said that, although she loves acting, the real reason she does it is to support her charity work with animals.

To learn how you can support pet cancer research, visit PetCancerAwareness.org.