That’s really interesting. I wonder if this is a shelter-by-shelter variation, or perhaps a regionalism…? Any thoughts?
It doesn’t match up with my partner’s experience (where a lot of the shelter medicine seems to be done assembly-line style by technicians rather than veterinarians), or the typical shelter medicine video you see on YouTube.
The way my partner describes it (though this is just secondhand knowledge), high-end vet medicine is a trickle-down from human medicine (usually a few years or decades behind), which then trickles down to your average family vet, which then eventually trickles down somewhat to the shelters, but they can only afford the cheapest bulk operations.
The average high-end vet bill here without insurances starts in the thousands of dollars and can bleed into the tens of thousands of dollars. It’s hard to imagine any shelter being able to pay for that for numerous animals, even at a significant discount. Even if the vet were offering their services at cost, there’s a lot of subcontracted work and equipment (imaging, lab work, etc.) that get farmed out to other providers who probably wouldn’t be able to offer the same discounts, so right off the bat, you’re limited to a much smaller menu of available procedures.
Less-wealthy pet owners often have to take on significant debt to treat their animals, or else have to surrender them (in the hopes that one of the techs will adopt it, and then the hospital will take up a collection to perform the operation at cost). Her particular clinic also has its own fund, run by a separate but connected nonprofit, to help low-income owners pay for procedures they wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford. I can’t imagine the shelters have that much income and liquidity…
Maybe the ones you’re familiar with operate under a different financial model? I’m genuinely curious now.