Vet care for shelters and pet owners

In My Humble Opinion
1

Continuing the discussion from Charity to leave money to?:

As this is not on-topic for the thread that spawned it, I’m replying in a linked thread.

I guess it depends what the pet is being treated for. As i mentioned previously, a shelter isn’t going to pay for chemotherapy for an animal dying of cancer. And once, we were fostering a kitten that we found unresponsive on the bathroom floor. It needed a day of IV fluids and similar high-tech supportive care, and the shelter said they couldn’t afford that. They gave us permission to pay for the care, or they would pay to have the kitten humanely euthanized. Mostly because my kids were emotionally involved with the kitten, we paid for the care (about $1k) and the kitten recovered. After it survived the night and seemed more stable, we took it out of the emergency care hospital and took it to one of the regular shelter vets (our vet, as it happened, but selected by the shelter) who diagnosed a likely respiratory bug that got into the brain, and gave it cheap antibiotics, which seemed to help. The kitten then got supportive care at our home (provided by us) and mostly recovered.

So no, shelters here don’t pay for expensive procedures, either. But most of the bread-and-butter care, like immunizations, spay-neuter, treatment for parasites, antibiotics, are provided by the same vets who offer the same care to pets. I don’t think it’s any more “assembly line” than the primary care that pets get.

2

Thank you for the details! (And please feel free to move my post(s) from there to here, too).

3

One shelter (all cats) that I adopt from has a program to cover certain veterinary care costs if you adopt one of their cats with special needs, but you have to use one of the vets in their network of service providers, who I assume give the organization a break on their costs. Merrimack River Feline Rescue Society has this brief blurb about it on the webpage about adoptions; when I took some cats with medical issues I was offered the program, at a vet within a reasonable driving distance from me, but I chose to stick with the practice I’ve used for many years for all my other animals. The dollar amounts are the adoption fees depending on the age of the kitten or cat.

Chronic Care - $50 to $300
Some of our cats with chronic health issues may be eligible for this program, where MRFRS covers the cost of all specialized care/medications/food for the cat’s lifetime!

4

The shelter I volunteered at had a deal with a couple of local vets. They would do the regular well-care stuff. At a real cut rate.
A couple more would take turns being on call for emergency stuff.

I’m almost certain those vets covered the cost except maybe they had cheaper pharma and supplies from parent organizations.

My vet was one of the emergency vets, on call.
I often gave $$$ to the shelter surgery fund.

5

So I asked my partner more about this (not to try and disprove anything, just to better understand why she said this of them). And, to be clear, this is by no means an attack on shelters… both she and I are very grateful they exist at all and provide the care that they do to the animals most in need.

Anyway, in her experience:

  • Shelters have less financial resources (this we know, of course)
  • But that doesn’t just mean that there are operations (like chemo) that they won’t do. Even for the routine operations like spay/neuters, the shelters she’s known do them differently in order to limit costs
  • At the vet clinics she’s worked in, a pet coming for an operation would get multiple assistants to watch over it before, during, and after the surgery, even for something minor. They’d give it a cocktail of sedatives, intubate it with a breathing tube, monitor its vitals and comfort levels, and gradually wake it up after the operation with an “antidote” to the sedatives (sorry, my paraphrase… something to gently wake them back up afterward while minimizing grogginess and other side effects). They’d typically have the operation room all to themselves until they’re fully recovered. So it’s a lot of labor and slightly more materials.
  • At the shelters she has experience with, animals would be be spayed/neutered in small batches rather than individually. A technician would come in and sedate each one, one after the other. They use cheaper sedatives that are apparently a little “harsher” for the animal (not less safe or effective, apparently just less comfortable upon waking up). They would not get intubated. Once the sedatives are applied, the technician leaves and goes on to other tasks. Eventually the vet doctor comes in and spays/neuters them one after another. They leave, the technician returns, and the individual animals are put back in their enclosures/cages. There isn’t someone watching them the whole time, and they don’t get the individual time & attention they would at a regular clinic.
  • I asked them if the bulk operations like this are any less safe, and she said not really, as far as she knows. They’re not highly risky procedures to begin with; the clinics with rich clients just try to make the animals more comfortable through the whole process.
  • Also, in the particular shelters she’s experienced with (in California and Oregon), they had their own doctors who worked there, not volunteers from other clinics. That (and other parts of this) may entirely be regionalisms.

Again, super grateful that shelters exist, not trying to insult them, yadda yadda, just trying to explain what she meant by that. It sounds to me like they make the most out of limited resources and just don’t splurge on “less-than-medically-necessary” creature comforts the way a more expensive place might. How much of those comforts are really for the animal, vs their owner’s feelings and pocketbook, is up to interpretation, I guess…

6

That’s interesting. And i think that both shelter medicine and your partner’s practice are out of the norm here.

All the local shelters make appointments with ordinary vets, who are also in private practice, for veterinary care. None is large enough to support its own vet. None has facilities for operations, either. So they bring the animals to the vet.

In emergency cases, I have brought the animal to the vet. Both the one who needed more care than the shelter could pay for, and also, her brother needed an emergency circumcision, and i took him to our local vet. That was on the shelter’s dime. (As was the first kitten’s follow-up exam and treatment.)

They do usually try to spay or neuter several animals on the same day. I assumed that was to simplify logistics, but maybe they do small batches at once. If so, it’s very small batches, because I’ve had to bring in 2 kittens from a litter of 4, because that’s how many appointments they had that day.

It was years ago, but my husband once was invited to stay and watch a pair of kittens we owned get neutered. (He didn’t make it through the procedure, but he saw the start.) The kittens got a shot of something to knock them out. The vet tested that they didn’t respond to minor pain, and then started cutting. He gave them back to my husband before they woke up. (Our current vet keeps the animals until they’ve recovered from anesthesia. That’s good, as one of those kittens had a bad reaction, and we had to restrain him to keep him from hiring himself.) But there was no team of assistants.

My current vet actually does have a team of (2) assistants who help with routine exams. They do stuff like restrain the animal and feed it treats to distract it from the needle prick. Maybe they help with operations, too. I dunno. He only gives the shelter a 20% discount, i bet he uses the same assistants for private and shelter care.

So i think your partner’s regular care is more extensive than what my pet cats get, and your shelter care is a little more bare-bones than what my shelter cats get. And i think both are closer to what your shelter animals get.

7

There’s probably a lot of variation both between different areas and between different individual vet practices. And I have no idea how representative her experience has been (or not).

I do know that she’s been lucky enough to have mostly worked at independent veterinary clinics, which in and of itself is an anomaly — more and more of them get gobbled up by corporate conglomerates every year, which often causes quality of care and treatment of staff to plummet within a few years.

She also hears a lot of secondhand experience from her coworkers and patients, and the quality of care can differ dramatically between different practices, even in the same town. Most are “fine” for some wide definition of fine, but a few are outright bad (teetering on malpractice, and in some cases, vets actually flee across state lines to continue practice after having been de-certified by the board in their former state…).

The majority of people in the industry are in it out of a love of and for the animals, so they tend to be good more often than not, but the profession also has a pretty high suicide rate… despite the high costs to pet owners (usually due to a lack of pet insurance), the pay for veterinarians and technicians is generally not great, and much lower than human doctors and nurses with similar skillsets and experience levels.

In terms of different levels of care, her latest clinic is truly quite far out of the norm. They a referral vet for emergencies and specialties. Other local clinics will refer cases to them that they can’t resolve on their own, both locally and within a few hundred miles’ radius. They often host trainings for other doctors and assistants in the vet community. They are humongous, having grown to 150+ employees during and after COVID (when a lot of people got pets). They have separate departments for not only emergencies, but also CAT scans, a MRI, ophthalmology, oncology, dermatology, physical therapy, internal medicine… each with their own team of one or more doctors and several technicians, both unique to their department and general ones that float between several areas. They also have an on-site daycare, pub, and food truck pod… so yeah, it’s not quite the same as your typical small-town one-doctor family vet! (This isn’t the only place she’s worked at; she’s been doing this for nearly two decades at different clinics large and small… it just goes to illustrate the very wide spectrum that they can operate under.)

8

I have noticed corporate vet offices opening up locally. But most of the vets in the area are still either independent (one, two, or a small group) or part of a large animal hospital. The vet group my sister used to go to was recently purchased by a corporate practice, and shortly thereafter, most of the staff quit and formed a new group a couple of miles away. So this is an active change in my area.

9

That’s awesome to hear!

It’d be nice to see a national federation of independent vets, similar to how food co-ops can associate under the co+op umbrella.