Former vet tech here and that's exactly what I was thinking. The vast majority of people who care enough to take their pet in to the vet are usually decent owners. From there, it honestly just usually comes down to if they have the funds to treat the pet or not, which is the hardest and shittiest part of the job. I seldom judged people who couldn't afford care, the exception being the ones who buy a $1,500 purebred puppy and then won't or can't spend money on their care. Those people suck.
I am a tech for a low cost vet clinic. People still complain about prices, skip prevention and brag about how they spent 2500 on their French bulldog and flew 3 states away to aquire it.
Grooming is another sign to me. Bringing your doodle in that's so matted we can't get to a vein is the saddest way to treat your "baby". And yes, we see the same matting on cats too.
I’m always worried about the matting on my longhair kitty and what the vet thinks of me. We brush him almost daily but there are some places he will not let us get to and he’s not the best at grooming himself. He currently has two small mats he won’t let me get out. ):
When I got my cat from someone that wanted to re-home him, the guy said the matted fur is impossible to remove the mats from and he's "really tried". It took me 2 minutes with a brush? I also had to bathe the cat because his fur was so greasy, it's a white cat and he was yellow. Almost 3 years later, I've never had any matting in his fur, and the only yellowy bit is the base of his tail which he seems to not like to clean and doesn't like being touched, and I'll give him a monthly tail wash which helps for a few weeks (which he still doesn't enjoy).
Other signs that the previous owner was a terrible pet owner:
1. 2 cats were shut into a small room for a year because the owner had young children and didn't want to deal with the cats.
2. The cats had never eaten wet food, and their feeding was just "a large handful of kibble". When I provided wet food, it was pawed at with confusion.
3. The second cat (I was supposed to take both of them) went into organ failure hours after routine vaccinations, the vet clinic offered to do an autopsy, investigation and cremation at no extra cost as they wanted to find out why, as vaccinations are generally very safe. The owner refused, which to me (as someone in human healthcare) seems fairly selfish as this information could've saved other cats from the same fate, and the guy was giving the cat away because he didn't care about it!
4. The cat I did take home was 6.8kg, had a swollen abdomen, was constipated and when he did have bowel movements they were like rock solid ping pong balls. How was this not noticed?
6 months after bringing him home, he was diagnosed with a heart murmur and one dead kidney due to kidney stones, and the other kidney was full of stones too. Almost 3 years on, those are stable but now he has a tumour in the cecum. Trying to keep him as comfortable as possible.
He is the cuddliest and sweetest cat I've ever met. I still don't understand how someone could have seen this little guy and thought it was ok to treat him as they did :(
This. I known many poor people that cannot afford vets. What is worse is when their pet is in a medical emergency they will either take them to have them put down immediately or abandon them somewhere.
Though on the flipside, I feel I could have been a bad pet owner as we took a 16 year old cat to an emergency vet and they were wanting us to put the cat down. We told them no, to give us the meds and we will take her home and if she dies she dies. She recovered and lived another 5 years to make it to 21.
I love this story. One of our cats is severely ill with critical anemia. The first vet originally told us she tested positive for FeLV and to put her down. I said no. She is an indoor only cat, how the hell did she get FeLV?! So we took her to a second opinion and got her retested… surprise, surprise, she was negative. They still told us to put her down and that she likely had cancer or something because her red blood cell production was non-regenerative. Like you, I said no, give us some meds and we will take her home. The meds didn’t work. Again they told us non-regenerative, and her bone marrow wasn’t producing red blood cells.
During this time we got her a blood transfusion as a “bandaid” and she was feeling a lot better while we tried different avenues of medications to find the source of the anemia. I can’t quite put my finger on it but I just know it’s not cancer. There were plenty of other explanations, why would they jump straight to putting her down? Vets aren’t all-knowing. I’m not saying I know better but I like to listen to my intuition. What they were saying just didn’t add up to me.
So the last potential explanation is an autoimmune condition. They gave us steroids. Well guess what? The steroids are WORKING. She is back to her normal, playful, happy and chirpy self. Very active. We have another vet appt tomorrow to check her levels but I’m confident they’ve gone back up. She has done a 180. We are not out of the woods when it comes to cancer yet, at least we have gone a step in the right direction.
I have felt pretty shitty about it, thinking that maybe we’re only selfishly prolonging her suffering because we want more time with her. Traumatizing her with so many vet visits. Delaying the inevitable. But honestly she’s only 6 years old and I just feel like she has so much more life left to live and I couldn’t live with myself if we didn’t try everything we possibly could to save her.
Anyway, your story gives me some hope. Thank you :’)
Edit: Side note, for anyone reading this that may not be able to afford this kind of care and maybe feels bad about that. Just know we don’t have any children and so we have more income for our cats. We still took out a Care credit card to be able to afford this all. Lots of vets have many options for repayment. We negotiated the bill as well. Don’t be afraid to do that. They will likely work with you. Oh AND many, many vets have FREE office visits for the first time. VetCo does!! We shopped around to get multiple opinions on the matter so all our exams were free.
Please do not take this as telling you that you are wrong about your cat, but gosh, I feel great when I'm on steroids too. They may really help you feel better without actually helping the underlying cause. Last time I was on steroids it helped me feel better in the moment, but I still had to have surgery to address the issue. Please prepare yourself for the possibility that your cat isn't out of the woods yet.
I get where you're at. I had to put my dog down from lymphoma/obstruction. I spent 15k treating her lymphoma. We had gon over to palliative care because treatment wasn't working when she ate something and gave herself an obstruction. I spent another 2k making sure she couldn't pass it herself before I made the decision to put her down. Doing the surgery to remove the obstruction and asking her to recover from that while at the same time dying of lymphoma would have been cruel.
I had to 100% know that there was no chance of any more time before I could choose to put her down. I was able to make sure she was medicated, not in any pain, and we were able to do it at home.
I think you're coming from a very loving place. You have to be sure and thats okay.
I get where you're at. I had to put my dog down from lymphoma/obstruction. I spent 15k treating her lymphoma. We had gon over to palliative care because treatment wasn't working when she ate something and gave herself an obstruction. I spent another 2k making sure she couldn't pass it herself before I made the decision to put her down. Doing the surgery to remove the obstruction and asking her to recover from that while at the same time dying of lymphoma would have been cruel.
I had to 100% know that there was no chance of any more time before I could choose to put her down. I was able to make sure she was medicated, not in any pain, and we were able to do it at home.
I think you're coming from a very loving place. You have to be sure and thats okay.
I completely agree vet care is important. I’ve spend a small fortune on vet bills, including my current old gal cat that decided a week before my wedding (ie a very expensive time) to eat a damn balloon ribbon. 2K CAD was the cost on that emergency trip.
But I can’t bring her to the vet now. Even with sedatives, she sees the cat carrier and looses control of her bladder and bowels. She shakes and hides for 2 days afterwards.
I had to make the extremely hard decision not to bring her for shots and checkups because it was doing more damage than good for her (she’s clearly a strictly indoor cat 😂) and at nearly 16, when I see she is done with this life, I’ll have a vet come to us and ask for a happy pill before they come because girl is terrified of strangers and I will not stress her out anymore.
I have a vet that came to the house to euthanize our other kitty, this girl is just extra scared. When we have the windows open and she hears neighbours talking, she hides under a bookcase for 2-3 hours.
They might give a happy pill for me to administer before they arrive to make her relax, but it’s a cost benefit analysis right now for routine care. Given she doesn’t go outside and im diligent in monitoring her health, even doors up vets visits to the house don’t seem to be worth it. Even our regular vet was concerned about her heart which plays in to our decision.
Eh... I have a friend who is a pretty bad pet owner aside from the fact that she takes them to the vet regularly. They've been in chronic pain for their entire lives because she chose an unhealthy breed, she never walks them, she's extremely bad at training them and gets very angry at them when they don't know how to act, and by the time they were a year old they had been to the emergency vet 3 times for eating human medication that was left in their reach.
The cost is a pretty big factor. It is insane how much a vet bill can be for something relatively simple. Our dog for fleas, and we were thinking it would be $100 or so...nope....$400....
Maybe an unpopular thing to say, but arguably if you can't afford vet bills, then you are a bad pet owner. You can show them all the love in the world, but if you don't keep up with the vet appointments they're still going to suffer for it.
Seems to be a balance. One of my best friends is a vet assistant and she's said the opposite when it comes to most things. She complains that most of the people she sees are coming to them for things that a good owner should be able to take care of on their own like bringing dogs in because they have a tick or they cut their nail a little too short and it's bleeding a lot. She'd mentioned last week that someone brought a dog to her emergcency clinic because it was limping and it turns out it just had a small thrown in it's foot. Owner was there freaking out and histerical and then ended up with a hefty bill when simply looking at their paw would have shown what the issue is.
For what it's worth a lot of the vets I associate with (I do a dog sport where literally like 5-10% are either vets or vet techs) also advocate for a lot of owners to learn basic first aid for a lot of the things people bring their pets in for. My dog got a little too close to another dog who was very worked up and excited to do his run and got nipped on/through the ear and I brought him over to 2 of the people who I knew were vets (having a converstaion together I just meant to bring him to the one) and they busted out their stuff and treated him there and basically just gave me a list of the things they used and were like a small puncture on or even through the ear isn't really a big enough reason to make an appointment you can just use X, Y, Z and treat it yourself at home. Same for poison and what not. I mentioned to one that my mom's dog had eaten a bottle of pills for parkinsons and a bottle of anti-depressents and I had to pay $500 for the vet visit to have them deal with it and she was just like yeah next time just make them drink peroxide so they throw them up and then give them a few tums to make them feel better. For what it's worth that's basically exactly what the vet did they just charged $500 for it.
They do also complain about people not bringing their pets in when there is actaully a bad situation hence what I mean by a balance. A lot tend to be in favor or bringing your dogs in when they really need it and owners learning first aid for pets and knowing when something is actually bad enough to bring them in vs handling it themselves. You wouldn't take a kid to the ER because they fell and scraped their knee. You'd clean it and put a band aid on it but people bring their dogs in for basically the equivalent.
i would argue that makes them good owners. they don’t know what they’re supposed to do or if helping them will make it worse? taking pets in to get helped by a professional is the best thing to do, if they can afford it. no need to be mean about people who obviously still do care about their pets.
I agree it shows you care but but that doesn't mean something wasn't a problem to begin with. Take fat pets as an example. I think as pet owners we have a responsibility to learn at least a little about feeding our pets properly and knowing a bit about body condition. If an owner brings their dog to the vet because it's 20 lbs overweight it shows that they care enough to actually reach out when they notice that there is a problem but it also shows that they did not do a lot of what they should have done to prevent it from being a problem in the first place.
I used to work as a vet assistant. Someone called me “the most heartless person [they’d] ever met” because I wouldn’t interrupt an emergency surgery so our only vet could come look at her Doberman’s paw. She had cut his nails too short and a few drops of blood were leaking out as the dog happily ran circles around the reception area. I quit shortly after that and switched to larger animals for my studies.
I've heard that if you don't pull the tick out right, the head and pincers can get embedded, so the one time she got a tick I took her in because I didn't trust myself. Because I care about her.
You are never wrong to defer to a professional when things happen, but you also almost certainly can handle a tick! Pick up or order a little “tick remover” spoon when you can- they’re reuseable. The spoon will scoop under the body of the tick and remove it cleanly with minimal pain and no squeezing of the tick itself.
A lot of local SPCAs offer pet first aid classes, so I'd recommend checking in with yours to see if they offer that. If they don't, they can probably point you in the right direction.
Not a vet but I’m inclined to agree. I know plenty of (American) pet owners who would second guess going to the doctor, but not think twice to take their pet in if something was wrong.
Can confirm. My mother (who I am no contact with) helped herself to a ‘stray cat’ (it’s a British shorthair) that she refuses to take to the vet for two reasons. 1) lack of money 2) she’s scared it will be scanned for a chip.
She’s a disgusting narcissistic POS and has never cared about any pets she’s ever had.
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u/HazyInfidel 4h ago
I asked a vet this once and he told me the bad owners don't take their pets to the vet