My Beastly Creatures

This is a truly fantastic article about the difficulties facing vet medicine right now.

The struggles facing animal care aren’t as simple as the oft-cited one of more pets, fewer staff. Experts say several factors are at play, with some a long time coming and others caused or exacerbated by the pandemic.

I'd also like to point out, along with the verbal abuse, high turnover rates for vet techs, and high debt for veterinarians, etc mentioned, there is an extremely high suicide rate for vets AND vet techs (techs are often not mentioned in these statistics and the below mentioned 2019 study was the first to even consider suicide rates in techs).

The study found that female veterinarians were 2.4 times as likely as the general U.S. population to commit suicide and that the rate for male veterinary technicians was five times higher. Among male veterinarians and female veterinary technicians, the rates were 1.6 and 2.3 times greater, respectively. This is the first study that also considered suicide rates among veterinary technicians.

Washington is in a particularly bad spot as far as veterinary medicine goes, but even before COVID, veterinary medicine staff have been struggling for a long time to survive and make ends meet. There's little people outside of vet med can do, but do what you can.

Be kind, be patient, and try to plan ahead. Make appointments early for wellness/vaccines and make appointments when problems first come up rather than a week into them when it can no longer wait. It's much easier to cancel an appointment than figure out how to work one in on a Saturday when that schedule was full 2 weeks ago.

I was recently given these photos of my grandparents’ GSD, Prince. Taken around 1949-1951.