Dr. Bartholomew Buckeye Bottoms, who was featured on a National Geographic Wild show, is now practicing in Pacific Palisades.
Where is Dr. Bartholomew Buckeye Bottoms? The internet is rife with speculation about the veterinarian that was featured on National Geographic Wild show “The Adventures of Dr. Buckeye Bottoms.” He was a mobile vet that traveled the Islands of Hawaii, treating various animals. The show aired for two seasons (11 one-hour episodes) to highly enthusiastic reviews.
The shows are highly entertaining, not only for the vet’s expertise, but also for Dr. B’s enthusiasm for doing everything from pregnancy tests on cows to seeing a dog with an itchy butt to examining goats. The vet is a natural in front of the camera.
Recently a You Tuber aired “We need to find out what Dr. Buckeye Bottoms is doing. He does not have social media profiles or any other websites and platforms were we can stay updated with him. . . .Unfortunately, we cannot find him his whereabouts and status is unknown.”
This editor found Dr. Buckeye Bottoms on Via de la Paz at the Palisades Veterinary clinic, when she took her dogs in for an annual checkup. Dr. B was unrushed, relaxed and knowledgeable as he treated the “furry babies.”
Dr. B is the son of actor Timothy Bottoms and singer Alicia Cory. The couple divorced, and when he was 15, he went to live with his dad.
He grew up around lots of animals: “dozens of dogs, 25 horses, cats and a pig that barked like a dog and ate dog food . . .a lot of dog food.”
Dr. B said from the time he was little, animals connected with him. “Animals are intuitive,” he said, “It was sort of like a magnetic field. I was drawn to them; they were drawn to me.”
He remembers watching a National Geographic special with his mom. “She was crying and said, ‘all the animals are drying and going extinct.’ I was upset because my mom was upset.” Her upset would become his.
When he was a sophomore in high school, his father had adopted two feral horses from the Bureau of Land Management. They took them to the vet to have them fixed, the vet looked at the teen and said, “Do you want to castrate one?” The vet showed him how on the first horse, and then the teen did the second.
The vet, Dr. Saunders, liked the youth’s instinct with animals and said, “I can’t pay you, but if you want to ride along and learn. . .”
Dr. B said for the next five years he went on calls with Saunders and got hundreds of hours of experience. In the top three percent of his high school class, he was accepted to the pre-vet program at California Polytechnic State University and graduated in 2000.
As a surfer, he originally thought about specializing in marine animals. He was accepted into three vet schools and selected Atlantic Veterinary College in Canada.
Sea otter
After graduation, Dr. B practiced in Santa Cruz. He volunteered with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and assisted head pathologist Dr. Melissa Miller to determine why sea otters were dying. They examined 30 dead animals found near Santa Cruz and 50 found at Morro Bay.
The cause was attributed to toxoplasmosis— “There were thousands of feral cats living in the wilds of Santa Cruz and the coastal mountains,” Dr. B said. “They poop on the landscape and the rain washes the fecal material into creeks, rivers and ultimately the estuaries, bays and near shore coastline concentrating in the mussels, bivalves and filter-feeders, which is the primary food source for the Southern Sea Otter.
Dr. B explained that the cat is the only animal where the life cycle for the Toxoplasma protozoan parasite is completed in the gut and then the infective stage Oocyst is shed in the cat poop.
Next, the vet volunteered for a Leatherback sea turtle ‘Capture’ team for veterinarian Heather Harris’ doctoral project.
Leatherback’s are the largest turtles in the world and they travel as far as 10,000 miles or more each year during migration. “These are the dinosaurs of the turtle world,” Dr. B said, noting their population has declined as a result of intense egg collection, hunting, fisheries bycatch, coastal development and coastal lights click here.
While on the watch, they came across an entangled humpback whale. Unable to get it out of the fishing net, Dr. B began looking at the plight of whales. He met a man who wanted “to save” wildlife and accompanied him to Tonga and made a documentary.
He showed the documentary to Heath Ledger, who instantly came on board wanting to make a full-feature film about the plight of whales. “We wanted to make an unbiased whale documentary,” Dr. B said.
The vet was on a panel discussion at a Pro-Whaling meeting in Tokyo, Japan.:
“The Normalization of the International Whaling Commission Conference.”
In preparation for the film, “We also interviewed many big players and filmed at the 59th annual International Whaling Commission conference in Anchorage, Alaska,” Dr. B said.
When Ledger died in January 2008, the money for the project and the project died. After Ledger’s death, instead of a full-length film, a six-minute animated clip for a song King Rat delivered an anti-whaling message.
Then, this 2009 statement was released in The Times of Sydney. “Heath was very interested in defending the lives of whales and dolphins and the whole problem with Japan at the moment and whale hunting. . . . Heath’s intention was to raise awareness of modern whaling practices through a potent visual piece without having to say a word.”
The whale film went on hold, and when Dr. B was offered a job in Hawaii, he travelled to the Islands where he remained for the next 12 years.
A team of specially trained NOAA rescuers successfully free a humpback whale from a life-threatening tangle of fishing gear off the Kona Coast of Hawaii. R. Finn / NOAA MMHSRP permit #932-1905
The National Geographic show was not renewed after 2018, and a year later he returned to the mainland. “There was a woman, and I missed my family,” he said. Then Covid hit and Dr. B settled back into a mobile vet practice, this time in the Santa Barbara area.
When Palisades’ Dr. Catalina Litochleb reached out to Dr. B to practice at her “full clinic,” rather than carrying vet supplies in his truck, he decided to make a change. He is in residence from Tuesday through Friday (when he’s not at the beach surfing). Extremely patient and knowledgeable, Palisades pets are lucky he is here.
An environmentalist, who helped push a plastic bag ban on Maui, one of Dr. B’s most fervent wishes is that the whaling project he started about 15 years ago, could be revived.
Dr. B is seeing pets at the Pacific Palisades Veterinary Center, at 853 Via de la Paz, (310) 573-7707.
Dr. Bottoms cleaning plastic from a beach on Maui.