Presumably they weren't all just bought by corporations, but they were all bought by the same corporation or by different companies that are colluding. That's a big price increase.
These worms have really gotten under your skin, heebie.
They crawl in, they crawl out, they play pinochle on your snout.
If a vet practice's biggest expense is employee salaries, the barriers to entry don't sound that high - it's not like you need to buy an MRI machine or something, you just need storefront space and some basic equipment - and if an independent vet can enter the market easily and offer better service at a lower price, then this corporate-takeover-hike-prices thing doesn't sound very stable.
I suppose the argument is that every time a new independent practice opens, the corps will buy him out?
Or underprice services in that area until the competition goes broke.
4. My dad's first job after academia in the US was for a pharmacy chain. His code set the prices individual branches would charge. Distance to nearest competing store was the main factor-- pharmacies near competitors had lower prices than distant ones. That was 1975.
Friend of m8ne from Davis is a vet with her own practice in Memphis. A classmate of hers lives near me, and I was thinking of taking any dog to her, but I know that the classmate was planning to sell out to private equity so that she could retire early. My friend agreed that she also would not want to take her pet to a corporate vet.
I think one of the concerns of the MA now corporate vet was that owners are now entitled to get prescriptions filled anywhere. Filling prescriptions was a major source of revenue for most vets. They never really raised their fees to adjust to that, I'm not sure what the right fees are. I think vets are grossly underpaid relative to human doctors, but I also think that a lot of human doctors are overpaid.
4: I mean, there are places people take their pets with cancer to get MRIs. I don't know how specialized the vet has to be before they have to have imaging equipment of some kind, e.g. x-rays.
4: I suspect the supply of new veterinarians is institutionally constrained like doctors, so there is a monopolization risk.
No idea on the licensure issues with, say, vet techs.
4: I think also people are reluctant to switch vets and shop around, or at least we haven't yet internalized the idea that that should be done every time fido needs an appointment.
Clandestine instagram-only vet operated out of an apparently vacant structure would work as a business model, but might run into regulatory issues. Suddenly the licensing requirement for barbers makes more sense to me.
Worth noting here that vets have absolutely terrible suicide rates, and that it's getting rare for a vet to stay in the business until retirement age. Basically it's a combo of A. putting pets to sleep is ghastly business, and B. pet owners I think are getting more and more demanding/emotionally tied to their pets, so it's become a more abusive relationship between owners and vets.
I remember when I was a kid and all the old vets (or the two my parents socialized with) realized there was money to be made in taking care of cats and dogs.
They should just change double if you use the term "fur baby".
Or just take care of cows and horses.
all the old vets (or the two my parents socialized with) realized there was money to be made in taking care of cats and dogs
As opposed to what, farm animals and rare pets? Or was there a missing word there?
They took care of livestock. There were way more cows that people.
That s/b than.
When I was little, lots of people didn't treat sick pets. They just shot it and got a new one.
Corporate vets treating livestock were paid less 20 years ago, but I suppose that came with regular benefits. I suppose the vets taking care of thoroughbred racing horses would be paid well, but their liability insurance would be high.
Re: depression and vets. About 8 years ago my friend came to Boston for a vet conference, and she said depression was one of the seminar topics. A big issue for the solo practitioners is that they worry about getting insurance (maybe disability or liability?) coverage if they have sought treatment for depression.
Worth noting here that vets have absolutely terrible suicide rates
Probably that's to do with availability of means. You also see higher suicide rates in doctors, nurses, dentists, and farmers (who have shotguns).
They took care of livestock. There were way more cows that people.
Corb Lund has a song about old school livestock vets.
Not really, but the barrier to getting one is really low.
I met someone over the weekend who I think went to vet school or had some in with the community, and she said that one topic of concern was depression/suicide, and another was the high proportion of strong weirdos who seem to gravitate to the profession. Unspecified in what way(s) weird.
Some of the biggest programs are at UC-Davis, Cornell, and Ohio State. Not many normal people at those places.
We recently switched to a cheaper vet. I don't think either one is corporately owned. I suspect another factor in the cost increase is the popularity of pet insurance. We have it; it's not great insurance, really, but you can see the incentive structure shifting as more people start to have it. I suspect veterinary medicine is seeing the start of some of the same dynamics that have been playing out in human medicine over the past 50 years.
pet owners I think are getting more and more demanding/emotionally tied to their pets, so it's become a more abusive relationship between owners and vets.
This is definitely a thing as well. All the vets I've been to lately have had signs on the door and/or in the lobby essentially saying "please don't abuse our staff."
People doctors definitely have those signs. I suspect the 'fur baby' attitudes plus pet insurance have made it easier to charge more, but it's probably going to put pet ownership out of reach for many. $700 for routine cat health care is more than what my insurance pays for a well child visit.
I periodically volunteer at the big annual dogsled race near here, and have usually worked with the vets. This year, a bunch of pre-vet students from Montana State took that over so I did other stuff. The vets recognized me from prior years, so I hung out with them a little. One topic of conversation was the huge difference in what vets can charge for services for large animals vs pets. Students and vets who went into it thinking horses and cows are moving to dogs and cats, because that where the money is.
Lesson: take your cats to a horse doctor.
There was a vet who wrote a book on Fresh Air last week that covered some of these topics. She struck out on her own, did house calls. There was a bit of woo.
We have a friend who is a vet and I see it from their pretty burned out perspective (gonna make it to retirement but only just). I'm sure putting pets down is emotionally hard, but also dealing with pet owners who see their pets as family and can't understand why the vets won't just save their pet, for free if necessary. I think a lot of people are irrational about their pets and take it out of the vet when they find out bad news, including bad news about how much it's going to cost. Nobody is surprised at a knee surgery on a human that costs $12,000 but my impression is that vets are going to try to do the same surgery but for $2400 instead of 12,000 and they're still going to get massive pushback from the client.
As to the "why not just be a vet-in-a-van, fancy free?" I would guess standards of care have steadily advanced in veterinary care and you can't just go back to a 1970 model of care. Electronic record keeping, staff to keep things running smoothly. Just hard to do everything necessary for a modern practice. But I dunno, maybe I should read that book by the traveling woo vet.
Where are you getting your knee surgery?
When discussing treatment with my cat's illness with my and Cassandane's parents, they were aghast. $3,100 for emergency treatment of the urinary tract blockage in December, which we didn't like ourselves but was a fait accompli by the time we got the bill because they said the cat was days away from a massive heart attack. Then they recommended surgery for the underlying issue, which would have been less expensive than that but still expensive, but it never happened anyway because scheduling it was also a problem. Then a few hundred dollars here and there for visits and tests and medication until we finally figured out the condition was inoperable.
If we knew then what we know now, I'm sure we would have put the cat down back in December and be able to afford more features in the renovation we're planning. Once the pet was in the emergency veterinary hospital and we were dealing with an emergent situation it felt out of our hands, just like emergency medicine for people except in this country that can easily exceed four figures. I don't remember ever being in the room with my parents when they discussed vet bills for our pets growing up so I'm not sure how they handled the details.
36: guy in an unmarked warehouse, of course. for 15K he'll fix your whole body.
Back to the OP, $200 didn't actually sound out of line to spend on veterinary medicine per pet per year, but maybe I overestimate how much goes into deworming - it was never a problem for us. More at point of sale than for human medicine if you have decent insurance, but you can legally have expensive pets killed, right? Tradeoffs. If it does sound like a lot to Heebie, then I'd assume it's because I'm in a higher cost of living area.
37.last sent them to a farm upstate for recuperation
40: Whatever happened to Brock Landers, anyway? Did he change pseuds and he's still with us under another name? Leave in a tiff? Drift away?
(gonna make it to retirement but only just)
Yeah, my awareness of this is primarily through a friend of mine* who retired at ~45 because she just couldn't take it anymore. She had opened her own practice (with a partner) maybe 10 years prior. It's a very successful practice and I assume she either sold her share for a nice chunk or else gets passive income; she's no longer on FB, so I have no idea what she does now, but for awhile it looked like a lot of travel.
Anyway, she wasn't too explicit about how bad it was, but she said enough that I realized it was a problem and subsequently paid attention to other discussion of it.
*weird small world story: she was very good friends at college (in DE) with a fairly good HS friend of mine (in NJ). We met playing on a grad league softball team at CMU, for a team/school with which we had no real association. Somehow or other she mentioned me to our mutual friend.
Because he was here before me and I didn't read the whole archive.
44, 45: I can't find a link, searching the archives sucks, but I seem to remember a discussion where we learned that he believed well into adulthood that his parents actually sent sick pets to farms in the country for care. And similar discussions that left me with the impression that he was overly credulous. Interesting guy.
Uroke has been here more recently than Brock. I think he opened some kind of business which probably allows for less goofing off than being a lawyer does.
Maybe I am getting a mistaken impression from being very online, but I do feel like widespread attitudes around pet ownership have shifted enough that what I think is normal appropriate pet ownership is substantially out of the mainstream. From my perspective, it seems like the woke kids have lost their minds, but I'm still planning to re-up on pets at least one more go-round. If I am doing pet ownership wrong, hopefully no one will tell me to my face.
Perhaps similarly, my Very Online impression of college students was absolutely nothing like the actual college students in the class that I teach as a lecturer.
Even the woke kids have trouble making good decisions when it's time to eat their cat.
Cats eat the wild avocados, selecting only the most flavorful, then poop out the seeds. These avocado pits are collected to make premium guacamole.
Back to the OP, $200 didn't actually sound out of line to spend on veterinary medicine per pet per year, but maybe I overestimate how much goes into deworming -
Do you mean $200 per cat, or $200 total? $200 total sounds cheap to me for three cats, but my old vet was pretty cheap. He wouldn't have charged for three separate appointments with three separate intakes, etc, for example.
An emergency vet opened down the street. We used it once when the dog ate a whole bowl of chocolate chip cookie dough. It was expensive but maybe not out of line for an ER visit after hours- 500 to make him throw up and treat with fluids. The fluid treatment part was injecting him with subcutaneous saline and was about half the cost and seemed unnecessary to me so I do wonder how much they just add on additional treatments to up the price.
Our regular vet has had a lot of turnover and also had prices double in the last decade or so. Our dog is on a prescription food and they want us to buy it there but we buy it from national chains for half the price.
It takes a lot of milk chocolate to poison a dog. We fed our dog two or three chocolate chip cookies a day for years. (Yes, we kind of didn't do well as responsible pet owners. )
57: Eh, I meant per cat, but I really don't have a basis for comparison anymore. I've only had the one cat of my own, I know the the details of my parents' pet spending, and even if I did it's been a long time since they've had anything as normal as "We have three otherwise healthy cats that need shots and deworming all at once, can we get a package deal?"
27: His educational career began interestingly enough in agricultural school, where he majored in animal husbandry, until they caught him at it one day.
52: I will say that AB's experience as a lecturer, and the experiences of some of our other friends who've taught more recently, lines up very much with Very Online cliches about college students, at least at moderately selective schools--I believe your student population is rather different from Pitt's*.
AB takes our current do to the dog park far more often than I do, but from her stories I'd say that dog-owning has definitely shifted over the past 20+ years, but perhaps less uniformly than college students. That is, attitudes that were once rare are now common, but still not the norm, let alone universal.
OTOH, soe attitudes that were once common, as noted above by Moby, are now beyond the pale, but I don't think anyone is surprised by that. An absolutely terrible client of mine who used to be a neighbor was horrified and disgusted that a mutual friend/neighbor put down their old/sick dog because it wasn't literally the only option. I think she was being ridiculous/extremist (and that most would agree), but that she believed herself to be within the mainstream.
*which didn't use to be selective, and in fact was quasi-commuter when AB started teaching; over 15 years, the student culture shifted dramatically in the direction of cliche, such as flagrant social media use in class and helicoptering parents
58: When our first dog had to be put down, it was in the context of a virus that made her sick, which led to hypoglycemic shock (I think) on a Sunday, which required us to take her to the emergency vet. 12 hours later they call us to put her down because it turned out that, in addition to her diagnosed diabetes, she also had a abdomen full of tumors, and she was too sick/weak to undergo any intervention. Just a horrible, ghastly turn of events, made considerably worse by a 4-figure bill. Obviously, we knew it would cost money, and we know they did interventions, but ultimately they did nothing for her but kill her. Ugh.
PS we managed not to yell at any personnel. Please clap.
I have no idea what the kids think. I keep buying increasing larger shoes for the world's most uncommunicative teenager. But obviously things like treating a pet for diabetes were done when I was a kid. There was the concept that some people went out and deliberately bought a cat, but even that was seen as spendy and unnecessary when you could just start feeding a feral cat and see if you liked it.
'were done' should be 'were not done'
FWIW, I see absolutely tons of traditionally-neglectful pet ownership around here... like our neighbors who left pets behind when they moved out. But the pets were still on chains on trees and in the house... Neighbors intervened, pets did end up not dead, but that one still hurts my heart to recall. Then there was a big screaming match when the owner came back a few weeks later and saw the dog he'd left for dead in the yard across the street.
As in, the asshole owner was furious at the kindly hippie who'd taken the dog in. I think the kindly hippie was equally furious at the asshole, but less likely to start a confrontation over it.
Did the former owner want the dog back or killed?
I do think as we densify over the next 50 years (in the good timeline), it will make sense for dog ownership to dwindle some. It's not great for them to be in apartments, even with open space nearby.
A Tiktok-popular dog behavior is huskies whining with a distinctive high-pitched keen - I bet that is strongly correlated with them being inside most of the day.
A Tiktok-popular dog behavior is huskies whining with a distinctive high-pitched keen - I bet that is strongly correlated with them being inside most of the day.
Our husky does that, usually to signify that she wants to come in from her occasional trips outside. She's very old though.
A friend just told me that when she goes to the vet for routine stuff like vaccinations and worming, the staff take the dog into a different room for treatment and they are not allowed to accompany it. They also expect the owners to medicate the animal in advance (trazodone) and have just told her that their dog will need an additional drug because it is so unruly.
Is this normal?
With my last cat, I went to a very old vet whom I loved. He expected me to come in and restrain her for shots-- it was quick and relatively painless for all involved. I would have never dreamt of sending her off with strangers in terror. Meanwhile, my friend sits in the waiting room, listening to agonizing yelps behind closed doors . . . at huge expense, no doubt.
I never heard of that. I did know that with our second dog, a groomer told us not to come back after the first time. But other groomers did fine. The dog groomers at the local Petsmart flat out killed a dog, probably because they didn't know what they were doing. The moral of the story is "don't go to the Petsmart next to where Whole Foods used to be."
Though I guess that fails to consider the hundreds of dogs they didn't kill.
Did the former owner want the dog back or killed?
Or did she want everyone to pretend that they hadn't done that, even if it meant the death of tied-up animals?
It's worth remembering that if Petsmart kills your dog, they don't charge you even for the grooming. And grooming is cheaper than euthanizing.
I think dogs can be fine in an apartment as long as they have people around. DogBreath was a high energy working breed, but Tim worked from home her whole life, so she had company and stimulus (and she wasn't waiting an entire workday between walks). So density can be workable, I think it's more about telecommuting.
People empty their dogs all over without too much trouble regardless of how little grass is available.
We go to the petsmart next to where the Whole Foods still is. They charge us a $10 bad dog fee because he doesn't like to let them brush his legs so I guess it takes an extra groomer for part of the time.
I read the linked article. It does not disprove my theory that the world is shit and everything in it is also shit. (twisaeiiias)
My students are fragile and feel a bit incompetent and sheltered in ways that are a little incomprehensible to me but they're overall likeable kids. They care about the right things and aren't looking to start witch hunts for social cred. Gen Z apparently isn't having sex or much face to face human social interaction and a lot of them don't want kids so I guess all that is all being replaced by pets.
68/74: My memory is that it was some expensive fancy breed that they were just using to churn out as many puppies as she could, and I think when he saw it was still alive, he wanted his money-maker back.
80: Seems weird that he would leave the dog to die. (That sort of sketchy backyard breeding operation is very common up here. I guess there's enough demand for the dogs to make it work, but I find the whole thing baffling.)
That's why you should get a rescue dog, like the greyhound someone here had that killed a cockapoo at the park. Not the off-leash part of the park, where I guess death is common.
That's why you should get a rescue dog
We have five! Someone else take a turn please.
I guess they're not technically rescue dogs but we acquired all of them through means other than "buying from a breeder or pet store."
Unless you steal the dog to sell for laboratory research, it's ethical.
If you steal it from a research lab it's extra ethical.
Gen Z apparently isn't having sex or much face to face human social interaction and a lot of them don't want kids so I guess all that is all being replaced by pets.
"All that" is covering a lot in that sentence.
A Tiktok-popular dog behavior is huskies whining with a distinctive high-pitched keen - I bet that is strongly correlated with them being inside most of the day.
I grew up with a Siberian Husky. She spent a lot of time in the yard, which at one point was completely open to her. Even after we kept her off the lawn she still had a long run to move about in the rest of the yard and along the side of the house. We took her for walks every day. And she still would whine to get in or out of the house, along with tapping on the sliding door with her paws. I think huskies might just be like that. She rarely barked.
Yeah, I think huskies just whine instead of barking in most contexts.
Apparently, you can neuter a male reindeer by lightly crushing its balls in your teeth. If that works for cats, at least you won't need to pay to have them neutered.
I've never owned a cat, so I don't know the details.
They have hooves though. I assume restraint is involved.
Between this thread and the current storyline of Mary Worth, I've been thinking a lot more about the mental health issues of veterinarians than I ever have before.
I had no idea Mary Worth was still a thing.
OH RIGHT *NOW* YOU'RE THINKING ABOUT IT
Sámi are probably bigger fans of Mary Worth than I am, yes.
There's a guy in Anchorage who has a pet reindeer. I think it's a female though.
Maybe it's male and he bit too hard?