Vet's fees

[marinyork]

At secondary school all I ever wanted to be was a vet. The teachers repeatedly tried to talk me out of it because it was way easier to get onto a medical or dental degree. The going rate for medicine or dentistry was two B's and an A. For veterinary is was straight A's.
And once qualified as a vet, there are few safe state paid jobs, you're out on your own, taking on all the financial risk of buying/leasing premises, acquiring and maintaining expensive kit, employing highly qualified staff, negotiating prices with drug companies etc, and of course paying for your own insurance and accountants.
I did in fact get the three A's and make it to vet school but gave up after a couple of years. I did another degree and got a job in the IT dept of a manufacturing company. A little while later a friend who had stayed the course showed me a salary survey in the vet's professional journal, it showed I was earning more as a dogsbody IT worker than I would have been after the same number of years as a vet.

As slowmotion probably knows in answering his own musings, one of the main reasons for the grade requirements is vet schools themselves. There were for decades only 6 vet schools and this never expanded until 2007 until Nottingham opened a vet school. If you compare the expansion of new medical schools, dentistry and pharmacy it is illuminating. In fact it almost accidentally ended up worse as under Thatcher two of them nearly got closed and got rescued so they'd only have been 4 and now 5. If you compare to pharmacy it annoys the people I work with, until the 60s it was just like Vetinary with only 11 pharmacy schools and now the numbers are disputed by different people but there's around 30, with huge expansion in the 00s.

I went to college with two people who went on to be vets and another who was turned down from vet school and a few others where we all had similar A-level grades and went on to do different things. As it turned out in that group they tend not to talk about the absolute staple diet for a vet talking about how many years they studied any more because the two vets, living in very modern times 'n' all now actually studied the least amongst our group. One of the ones who didn't get into vet school now earns a lot more than the rest of us, us other non-vets earn less. How much you earn and working conditions tends to be dictated by the company employing you. One of them waited a couple of years until Nottingham opened and went there, but has been employed by large practices with all sorts of weird and horrible work practices - 60+ hour weekend call outs being a regular feature - she's managed to escape that a year or two back.

 

[marinyork]

Had you known it was a fungal infection, you could have bought some Daktarin or similar for a few quid. As it was, you had to pay for their knowledge.

A pharmacy won't sell even general sales line medicines to someone if they say it's going to be used for a pet. You get a few people asking for Piriton to give to their dog or aspirin (both pharmacy items) - they seem to be the most common. If a human has an adverse reaction to a pet medicine, we're supposed to report it. Adverse reactions normally happen by not following instructions which can result in trips to hospital.

Vet prescriptions carry vat added on top, which annoys a lot of owners.

 

[marinyork]

I cannot imagine why anybody buying OTC stuff from Boots, to use on an animal, would want tell them that that was their intention.

Happens a few times a week. In some other pharmacies due to geographic location I'm told it happens a lot more often than that. Them's the ones we know about. In fact you can get into some protractedly long conversations about pets sometimes when it's quieter and they get going talking about vets and bills.

 

[Tail End Charlie]

£100 is pretty ballpark for that sort of thing.

Just one note about ringworm - it *IS* transmissible to humans, highly infectious and a devil to get rid of, so do be careful when handling your guinea pig. And if you or any family member end up with round red patches that itch, go and see your GP asap.

I remember my mum going to her GP with ringworm. The GP gave her some tablets to take, but she blamed her cat for the infection so fed the tablets to the cat instead. End of ringworm!

 

[Tail End Charlie]

Odd name for a cat.

Lolz. Actually the cat had a brilliant name, it was a Siamese called Sinbad, daft as a brush but very very tough. It once took on a stoat in a fight and killed it and I saw it once eat a bunny rabbit, every last bit - fur, feet, ears, everything bar the fluff at the end of the tail. It then hardly moved for three days as it digested it.

 

[Reynard]

Lexi can top rabbits - she brought me a snake last summer, and a pheasant...

In my experience, Siamese are smart, manipulative, shouty and in possession of a sheer bloody-minded persistence that's enough to drive anyone not used to it to the point of exasperation...

 

[SpokeyDokey]

Lolz. Actually the cat had a brilliant name, it was a Siamese called Sinbad, daft as a brush but very very tough. It once took on a stoat in a fight and killed it and I saw it once eat a bunny rabbit, every last bit - fur, feet, ears, everything bar the fluff at the end of the tail. It then hardly moved for three days as it digested it.

When we lived in T.Wells a neighbour had a male Siamese called Harvey.

The bugger terrorised our British Longhair and Persian.

But, more to the point, he was an expert killer. He hunted everyday and was constantly dragging rabbits and pigeons home.

His biggest known kill was a Crow. He'd taken a few Jackdaws prior to this but a Crow is another league.

Never ate any of his kills though.

 

[Reynard]

Smart? As kids we had two of the damn things get run over as they liked lying on the warm tarmac.... we had a dog after them - much more sensible.

That's not a function of Siamese intelligence. That's the "heat seeking function" in action - a function which overrides just about everything else. Siamese are well known for seeking - and then hogging - sources of heat.

 

[fossyant]

We were insured for our 3 cats. One was prone to doing stupid stuff as a young cat and came back with a half sliced off 'upper pad', then a hole in her side with a tendon or something hanging out (the vet didn't know either), but died at 16 with liver cancer. The other sister developed long term conditions, gingivitis which would have cost over a grand to sort - meds and eventually all her teeth out and later on developed an overactive thyroid (common in cats) which eventually lead to her demise (but she was 18). The non-related cat, which is now 10, bugger all wrong with her - to lazy to do daft stuff.

It's damned expensive to set up a vets practice, hence the fees ! My brother is currently buying into a dental practice and the costs/business loan is massive.

 

[LarryDuff]

[QUOTE 4768326, member: 9609"]We had to get the vet out easter sunday for a home visit, I'm not looking forward to his invoice arriving. what do you reckon many £100s ?[/QUOTE]
What would you charge for leaving your family on Easter Sunday and going out to do a job.

 

[slowmotion]

I cannot imagine why anybody buying OTC stuff from Boots, to use on an animal, would want tell them that that was their intention.

Is pentobarbitone available OTC
[QUOTE 4768326, member: 9609"]We had to get the vet out easter sunday for a home visit, I'm not looking forward to his invoice arriving. what do you reckon many £100s ?[/QUOTE]
Was it a racehorse entered for Ascot, or a glow-worm?

 

[Beebo]

[QUOTE 4768326, member: 9609"]We had to get the vet out easter sunday for a home visit, I'm not looking forward to his invoice arriving. what do you reckon many £100s ?[/QUOTE]
Our out of hours vet is the PDSA, they charge £152 for a consultation, and you have to visit them, but they are open 24 hours.

 

[screenman]

We rescued an abandoned greyhound a good few years back when the RSPCA would not attend, we took the dog to the vet 3 times a week for nearly 3 months, at the end the bill was 35 quid. The vet said that because we were prepared to commit to save the dog then so should he.

 

[Reynard]

The RSPCA are about as useful as the proverbial chocolate teapot if there's nothing in it for them (i.e publicity). This is me speaking with my cat rescue charity hat on - the one I volunteer for regularly has to step in when the RSPCA won't.

 

[slowmotion]

We rescued an abandoned greyhound a good few years back when the RSPCA would not attend, we took the dog to the vet 3 times a week for nearly 3 months, at the end the bill was 35 quid. The vet said that because we were prepared to commit to save the dog then so should he.

My father was no saint ,but our childhood dogs entirely comprised of rather wonky beasts that were brought to him to be killed but took his eye. Mainly terriers with bags of character.