Are We Too Hard On Our Vets?

drferox:

pvellamagi:

betheothergirl:

pvellamagi:

theexoticvet:

“Every Time”

Every time you say vets are money grubbing, or ‘too expensive’ or just in it for the money.

Every time you decline all diagnostics yet demand to know ‘what’s wrong with my pet’

Every time at a social function or other completely inappropriate
place you find out that someone is a vet you ask them for free advice
about your animal.

Every time you feel justified posting a shitty practice or vet review
when everything was done according to the standard of care but your pet
died anyway.

Every time YOUR lack of preventative care resulted in your pets early death yet you blame the veterinarian.

Every time she gets in early and stays late and works an 80 hour week
because your pet that had been ill for days suddenly becomes an
emergency at 5pm on a Friday and you demand to be seen – claiming these
heartless vets won’t treat your baby.

Every time someone says ‘why didn’t you become a real doctor?’

Every time someone complains about the cost of veterinary care…
comparing human medicine and insurance subsidies to pet ownership
(totally voluntary btw).

Every time that someone doesn’t pay their bill and thinks that they are entitled not to because pet ownership is their ‘right’.

Every time someone walks in to a clinic and threatens to ‘sue your ass if you make one mistake with my baby’.

Every time a graduate vet looks at the hundreds of thousands of
dollars in crippling debt and listens to clients driving Mercedes and
bmws complain about the cost of a spay using good anesthetic care and
adequate pain management.

Every time… You are part of the problem.

The problem is suicide in veterinarians. Most of us went to
veterinary school because we care. We have a calling to care…. but there
is a dark and expensive cost to compassion.

Think before you act or speak.

Author: Tamara Vetro Widenhouse, DVM

you know???

i can see how (poor is what i said before but that has an unintended double meaning) bad pet owners are a huge problem. it’s part of the problem i couldn’t do this job. i’ve read horror stories of vets talking of first-time clients bringing severely neglected animals and acting clueless as to why they’re unhealthy, etc

but the cost of vet school is NOT my fault, as a client

i have a very positive and trusting relationship with my vet, i follow her recommendations and work with her, and so i don’t feel necessarily that this is aimed at me, but crippling debt and comparatively/proportionately poor pay is not my fault. the inflation of vet school costs is a huge problem and i don’t remotely understand why this post isn’t emphasizing that more

Nobody is saying it is your (or anyone else’s) fault. Most vets accept that it’s never going to be a high paying position. Just slightly higher than average. What vets (and students) ARE complaining about is that despite the fact that vets are often underpaid for their work, in addition to massive debt, that there are people who would dare say that most vets are just “greedy and in it for the money and don’t actually care about animals”

like I said I do completely acknowledge that as a problem but it seems like we’re shifting the blame here from where it should be (inflated tuition and inflation in other areas, the prohibitive cost of Healthcare procedures that bring up the price and lower the vets margins, etc) to the consumer, and when the blame is for something as serious as literal suicide I couldn’t ignore that

Here’s the thing though, it’s the words you hear every day that get to you.

A vet school is expensive to run. It requires a lot of high tech equipment and the keeping of a lot of animals, which makes it more expensive to run than a human medical school. Even in Australia where the courses are subsidized as mine was, I’m still paying it off and my wages here are lower than they would have been in the USA to reflect that difference. And even with our procedures being relatively cheaper than the USA, we still get regularly reamed over the cost of pet care.

And we could live with it. We get warned at the start that you wont be paid well, and that’s okay because none of us went into vet for the money.

But when you’re stuck between a tight financial situation on one side, and people constantly telling you that you must make so much money and that’s all you care about and how heartless and cruel you are on the other… it definitely weighs you down.

Honestly, even if vet wages never rise, just getting the ‘money hungry vets’ narrative to stop would help so much.

An individual can’t change the whole system, but we can change how we approach each other on a one-on-one level.

Are We Too Hard On Our Vets?