My daughter's dog was hit by a car last night

[TheBlackAdder]

48. Having had a farm with 70 animals, that is a ripoff.

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The problem is that you need to find an old established family vet, which are now few and far between. There are so many vets in NJ, but the one I go to is over an hour's drive away, because they are great, they are reasonable, and they tell you what the scoop is. When you take your animal there, you are assigned a primary vet, but other vets will also look at the animal and they have a discussion as to the best treatment paths to take. So the doctors use each others skills, knowledge and observations before making a treatment plan.

I took my dog in for a foreign body embedded in his eye. The anesthesia, images, consult with 3 doctors, the removal, the meds afterwards came to just over $120 plus the most expensive thing charged--a $50 emergency visit cost bringing it up to over $170. Had I waited 3 hours, I could have gone in on an open window--but I had to be back at work. They said the other option was to take the dog to an ocular surgeon, which would have been a couple of thousand.

A lot of vets are now being bought out by animal hospital chains or are newer doctors who have a fuck ton of education expenses. Add on the cost of establishing a business if they are trying to do it on their own. One of the tricks they do is to play on your sympathy and then guilt you into buying health insurance for the animals.

We had a hose with colic and there is a well-known horse center that specializes in it, but they wanted $2,500 for the initial visit and upwards of $2-3K per day. We had to plan providing a $7,000 retainer. Now, this horse center treats animals in the $50K and higher range, not our older thoroughbred that cost us $1,500. Our vet, which specializes in both small and large animals, gave us guidance to treat the animal ourselves along with an initial visit from a mobile vet that ran $400.

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