The Daily Life of a Vet Tech

Two types of cats

No thoughts, head empty

Outdoor cats have a lifespan of 2-5 years. Indoor cats regularly live 15+, even getting up to 20+ sometimes. Unsupervised indoor-outdoor cats often don’t make it past 5 and the ones that do are a very lucky exception. Why?

They get hit by cars. They get attacked by other animals (predators or other pets like dogs) including other cats. They eat things that are toxic to them. They get killed by other humans. They contract diseases like FIV and FelV.

Even if your cat DOES live longer than 5 years, cats that go outside are responsible for the deaths of billions of birds and other small fauna per year. There have been studies done on this. It’s not people pulling stuff out of their asses, it’s something scientists literally studied and reported results on. Don’t believe me? Google “do cats kill wildlife” and have a read. They’re on the IUCN’s list of worst invasive species and have contributed to the extinction of 60+ species, and they continue to cause a problem for other threatened species of small animals.

If you think it’s okay to expose your cat to these hazards and potentially cut its lifespan by more than half, if you think it’s okay to allow your cat to kill native fauna to indulge it’s “natural instincts” instead of, I don’t fucking know, playing with it with toys literally designed to allow it to safely indulge those instincts, then you have no business following me.

I’m not here to indulge your whimsy about how cats “need” to be outside unsupervised to be stimulated and lead a happy life- I can assure you, they don’t. There are p l e n t y of enrichment devices and structures people can buy or make to ensure that their cats lead happy, full lives indoors to the ripe old age they are supposed to lived to.

You also have the option of lead training your cat if you really believe they need to go out. This is something that proponents of “let cats go outside” ignore almost completely. They somehow believe that it’s all or nothing- either the cat lives 100% indoors without ever seeing sunlight OR it’s let outside without supervision where it can be injured, killed, or cause harm to the environment. Those aren’t the only choices. Cats adapt to leads very easily. They don’t like it the first couple of times, usually, but also usually when they figure out lead=outside, they get over it and the best of both worlds gets to happen- your cat remains safely under your supervision where it cannot come to or deliver harm, and it gets to go outside.

Here’s one not attached to the house:

Here’s some from the outside view:

There are smaller versions too!

If our cat slips out when we open the door, and we can’t catch her, what should we do? We live in a place with a LOT of wildlife. She normally comes back in within an hour (she gets mad at us for “letting her outside”) but obviously we don’t want that to some day not be the case, and we want her to stop bringing us presents. Because gross and also not good for the environment/ecosystem.

Do we lead-train her and let her go outside and then she won’t get very far? Part of the reason she goes outside is to eat grass, so should we just buy some cat grasses and have them inside? We’ve thought about that but the grass isn’t always the only reason she’s outside, so we’re worried that she’ll keep getting out anyway and then that defeats the purpose of buying cat grasses.

As for the “gifts” you may want to look into some additional toys for her that can satisfy her desire for that particular behavior. Stick and string toys and laser pointers are good for this, but a lot of people don’t reward their cats for a solid catch, which is fine, but if your cat is looking to chase and catch a thing she can eat, it may help to give her a treat at the end of playtime. This encourages play behaviors with you over going outside to do it.

As for the cat grasses, you can actually make her a little grass mat!

All it takes is a large litterbox (or if you want to do bigger, go to a hardware store and look for the cement mixing section, and they sell rectangular black tubs there- that’s what the first two tubs are at least), some clean dirt, and some grass seed without fertilizer in it (or if you can’t find that, you can plant cat grass from a pet store in the middle, it will spread but not as fast).

Again, any one of these on their own likely won’t completely solve the issue, but between the three, you may see a decrease in escapist behaviors.

As long as we’re here, @crabcakedraws asked what I say to people in apartments whose cats scream and destroy things demanding to be let out, and first you should go have a talk with @pangur-and-grim about Grim’s behavior around go-outside time. My own advice is to take the time and effort to train your cat to go outside on a lead with you. If you think that’s too much trouble and you’d rather just expose your cat to the risk of illnesses, injuries, or potential death by opening the door and just letting them out, I definitely can’t stop you. But that doesn’t make it right or good.

Stray/Feral cats that do not belong to anyone are not what we’re discussing here. If you are managing strays or ferals that don’t belong to you but that in your location, that’s a different situation than someone who buys/adopts a cat and then releases it outside either permanently or off and on. The best course of action for managing ferals is to get them fixed (low cost spay/neuter places are GREAT for this! We got some feral cats at my college fixed for like $30/per) and make sure you give them what protection you can from diseases (for example, offering them wet food with a liquid wormer in it a couple of times a year). You can also affix reflective cat collars to them with bells- this will make them more visible to cars, and the bell can reduce their kill success by up to 30% (which, if you or others are feeding them is a good thing for local small fauna). If you aren’t sure a cat is a stray or an indoor/outdoor cat, buy a reflective collar and a tag with your # on it (costs like $10 total for both in a lot of places)- I can almost guarantee that you’ll get a call soon if the cat has an owner.

I’ve also talked some about enrichment, but we’re gonna talk some more, since it seems like people aren’t sure what counts for indoor cats. SO, let’s start with toys.

Wand toys (stick and string) are great for interactive play with your cat. They look like this:

They stimulate your cat’s drive to chase moving, fluttering objects and allow you to provide that live “kick” response when they pounce on it, because you can pull the string. They’re widely available but easy to make yourself- Here is a tutorial on making them yourself for cheap!

Laser pointers provide the same entertainment with a different sort of allure. Laser pointers are better for if you have a cat that likes to run a lot- you can easily send the dot far from you! They’re like $3.

You can purchase any number of chase toys that you can throw for your cat, in all sorts of shapes and sizes from mice to birds to random shapes. Many of them come with catnip in them. Some of them have noise makers so they shriek like the wildlife your cat is not killing outside. Some of them rattle. Some of them crinkle (in fact, you can get neat foil balls to throw that are shiny and crinkle). Some of them are spongy. There are so many options and cats LOVE them!

Kick toys are another great thing! Kick toys are usually bigger than throw toys and somewhat oblong, like a fish. In fact, many of the toys are shaped like fish! But there are also other kinds- I’ve seen rainbows and cigars and just big thin rectangles and bananas and a lot of others). These toys help satisfy your cat’s fighting/gutting instinct. If they were to indeed catch a big fish, they would be able to grasp it in their front paws and kick with their back legs to disembowel it. The same goes for other animals your cat might find itself in a fight with, including other cats. If your cat likes to tussle, this might just be the toy for them!

Circular ball toys are good fun for containing the small fast object your cat wants to chase (so they don’t lose it under the couch or something.

If you want to spend a little more for an active cat, you can look into getting them an exercise wheel! Many cats, when they figure out what it does, will thoroughly enjoy running on these things (and the videos on youtube are GREAT, if you want a good time go type in “Cat exercise wheel”). The first photo is the original wheel, but there are others out there now too.

If you want to take your cat outside but don’t want to lead train them or build a whole catio, there are other options like cat tents!

Indoors, cat tunnels are totally a thing and cats love them, especially soft ones.

You can also buy window perches that just suction cup to windows and don’t cause any damage to walls (good for apartments!) and they come in a variety of styles!

You can get your cat an autogroomer device, they come in several different styles:

This allows the cat to receive grooming from a source outside of themselves when you aren’t around.

You can purchase a see-through window feeder for birds, and place it somewhere that your cat will be able to see, so they will have something to watch while you’re not playing.

In addition to toys and activity devices like the above, you can give your cat enrichment during feeding and watering times as well. Waterers that have moving water are preferred by many, many cats:

And puzzle feeders can both provide enrichment and slow down cats so they don’t gobble all their food quickly (which often results in an upset tummy… I have heard a lot of stories of folks whose cats eat a bunch and then immediately puke it up whole… puzzle feeders help alleviate that! And they can be DIY for extremely cheap!)

(this one has toys in it, but you can put food in it too)

You are falling prey to the shifting baseline problem, which essentially means that your idea of a “normal” amount of wildlife for your area is going to be very different from what was normal 100 years ago, 200 years ago, etc. And the more we move the baseline of what’s normal, the more we lose sight of what an ecosystem was like before we went in and damaged it. We shouldn’t be looking at wildlife populations as they are now and considering them the standard to strive for, because these are populations that are struggling a lot more than you think. 

What you consider “a lot of birds” is almost certainly lower than what “a lot of birds” was in the same place a century ago. Sure, maybe your LOCAL ecosystem hasn’t seen what you see as a significant drop in wildlife population. However, just because a species hasn’t been marked as endangered or threatened by a government entity (which, by the way, tend to be woefully behind the reality of things because bureaucracy and lobbyists) doesn’t mean it isn’t in decline. In fact, a large portion of bird species worldwide are in decline, even ones considered common. 

This is due to a combination of a whole bunch of factors ranging from drastic habitat loss to pollution to, yes, predation by invasive species like cats. You can’t single out any one of these as THE reason; it’s the fact that they’re acting like a one-two (three-four-five-six-etc) combo punch that’s making it so damned hard for wildlife to adapt to the many ways in which humans have fucked things up so badly. It’s like when you get your rent raised by 40% and your car dies and you lose a third of your hours at work and your significant other loses their job entirely and ends up with a chronic medical diagnosis that’s going to need expensive medication for the long term, and all this happens in one week and guess what? Next week’s going to just be worse! 

Your local birds are parts of more widespread species whose genetic diversity is shrinking due to individual populations going locally extinct. And yes, that’s very important, because the rate of species extinction and endangerment has risen in the past 100 years and it’s only going faster. Which means that MORE species are going to edge toward endangerment, including ones you think are okay, ESPECIALLY as climate change hits us harder and makes it exponentially more difficult for all species to adapt to rapid changes in their environment.

So we NEED to treat our local wildlife as though they are precious, irreplaceable reservoirs of biodiversity and genetic resources, because that is exactly what they are. And the more people are “fuck, I don’t care” about the effects on their local population of a given species, the more likely it is that that species is going to experience greater fragmentation as more and more pockets of individuals go locally extinct and the remaining animals are more isolated from each other. Maybe it’s not obvious now, but it will be, and we have the power to do something about it BEFORE it becomes a problem. 

“This is due to a combination of a whole bunch of factors ranging from drastic habitat loss to pollution to, yes, predation by invasive species like cats. You can’t single out any one of these as THE reason; it’s the fact that they’re acting like a one-two (three-four-five-six-etc) combo punch that’s making it so damned hard for wildlife to adapt to the many ways in which humans have fucked things up so badly.”

Yes, it will die eventually, perhaps from another human cause. But it will have lived a little longer. Done a little more for its species. That matters in the big picture.

You know what I see outdoor cats for more than anything else? Mystery wounds and traumatic injuries. Cats that were probably hit by a car and can’t use their hind limbs. Lots of broken tails and broken legs. Rescues that bring us terribly matted, skinny, sick outdoor cats that are covered in parasites. My own kitten was found outside like this. I don’t know what happened to her but considering she jumped into the first car that opened their door for her (fortunately a foster for a rescue), I can pretty safely say she was not feral. So she was either abandoned, or the product of someone’s pet that they didn’t bother to spay. Either way, she’s lucky she got found by someone with good intentions. This is the reality of outdoor cats. The cats that I pass every day crushed on the side of the road.  The Good Samaritans that bring in their neighbor’s cat because it’s clearly sick and suffering. And they pay for their care because their neighbor won’t bother. This is not uncommon. Kittens that are dying from unknown illnesses that are going to take their life before it’s really even begun. Yes many of these cats may be strays, but we have no way of knowing which ones are because most outdoor cat owners don’t bother to microchip their cats and often they don’t even bother with a collar/tags. Let me be clear that my sample size is hundreds of cats. I work with cats every single day that I am at my job. For every 19 year old outdoor cat (which I have never actually seen at work), I can give you 10 more stories about 8 week old kittens with such a horrible flea infestation that their gums are white as paper from anemia.

I mean, it's kind of...not? I guess I can't speak for other countries but compared to the cost of equivalent human medical services in the US, vet med is MUCH cheaper. Really the only exception would be a dental cleaning because that involves anesthesia for animals but not for people (usually). And even then, we're talking hundreds of dollars compared to tens of thousands for most human medical procedures. I'm not trying to say that hurr durr a $1500 surgery is cheap or whatever, because for the individual it likely is not, but I'm looking at it as a comparison of services. People often don't realize how much cheaper vet med is because they have health insurance and don't necessarily see the price of individual services that they would be paying. Full labwork with same day results for $130? Super normal in vet med but unheard of for human med. Ovariohysterectomy? Less than $500 at most clinics, even for a 150lb dog that is functionally human sized. Get into shelter med and we're talking under $100. For a human? $40,000 or more. Hip replacement? Generally under $5000. In humans? Also looking at about $40,000.

Because pets are a luxury there also is only so much prices can be inflated compared to human medicine. Because let's be clear, US healthcare prices are extremely inflated. Yes vet clinics are gonna have stuff priced higher than the base value so they can, you know, pay their employees and stuff, but it's pretty limited. No one would pay $5000 to spay their cat. We literally cannot inflate prices too much or people won't pay them. There's no health insurance networks that force people to go to certain vet hospitals, so they'll just go somewhere else that's cheaper. Also individual vets do not set the prices of services. There's a market value for medications, anesthesia, equipment, utilities, doctor time, tech time, etc and then the owner/manager will upcharge certain services. So it is usually one or a small number of people setting the prices and most of the vets have literally no say over what people are charged. So when people get mad at us about how things are priced there is legit nothing we can do.

I can't speak for the cost at every clinic but I can break down what something like a tumor removal on a rat would look like at my clinic because it's super common and it is probably at least similar elsewhere. These are usually running $200-300 for us, depending on surgery time. Most of them pop out well and surgery time is less, but I've had some nasty ones that took really careful maneuvering to safely remove from surrounding tissue.

1. Doctor training/time. For some reason people get pissed when we want to be paid for our time but I'm over feeling guilty about it. We go to school for almost a decade in an incredibly mentally taxing program and we get $250,000 in debt to be paid a third of that on average. We deserve to be paid for our time. Plus if we are working with someone's animal, that means we can't work with another animal. An owner is functionally paying for a dedicated time block. Also a surgery like this is honestly not that hard once you get the hang of it but it is not something you learn in school. I had a bunch of extra training and CE to learn how to work with exotics and perform surgery on such a small animal. A lot of it I paid for out of my own pocket.

2. Surgery packs. Rat surgeries don't need much but you still need your equipment to make an incision, remove the tumor, and suture the skin. And we generally buy special small, clear, sticky drapes for our small exotics. Gloves and gowns could be put in this category too. So that's paying to sterilize all the equipment and maintain equipment, plus buying more suture, scalpel blades, etc.

3. Anesthesia and monitoring equipment. Oxygen canisters are expensive, and we need them for every surgery. Plus the actual anesthetic gas, doppler (for monitoring heart rate), and other equipment that might be used.

4. Tech time. Not only does the tech also go through tons of training to know how to monitor an animal under anesthesia there is once again more training that needs to be done for exotics. And again, their time is also functionally being paid for to keep them with that patient. They prep, monitor, and recover these animals so they can't do other treatments. At my clinic, we also have a treatment person dedicated to checking on these patients throughout the day so there's more training and time to pay for.

5. Pain meds. A very good thing to have after surgery.

6. E-collar or teeth trimming. Sometimes we make tiny cones for rats because they like to mess with their incisions but other times we will trim down their incisors (they grow back) to keep them from getting at it. Some rats get way too stressed with e-collars. This is more time, equipment, and training. We are often making our own e-collars out of x-ray film because they don't come in a small enough size.

7. Surgical follow up. Again, I know it varies from clinic to clinic but most do free surgical follow ups for monitoring and/or suture removal if needed.

8. Patient-doctor relationship. This is something people don't think about but if we've done a service like this, that opens the door for an owner to do something like text a picture of the incision and ask if they need to come in. That's potentially saving a trip. It also allows us to answer follow up questions via phone, email, text, etc as long as it's not urgent. So we may be on the phone with a client for 10 min or spend time answering questions in an email. Which isn't much, but when you have a dozen clients that want to talk to you it adds up. And honestly, there really isn't a built in cost for this or any additional research we might do. But theoretically it's covered with our time/training.

I hope that helps show why things are priced a certain way. Because honestly, there really isn't as much markup as people think. It just costs that much to cover everything we do + make enough to pay employees. It does vary by where you are, of course. Somewhere like Beverly Hills is gonna upcharge more than some random rural clinic because the cost of living is higher. But for the most part, there really isn't much we can do to trim prices all that much. Also keep in mind that while a lot of us don't necessarily give af about knocking some prices off, when we do that we are also potentially taking money from our techs who get paid actual garbage. I may not care about "miscalculating" how much my surgery time it was to decrease the cost but it's not fair for me to decide that for my tech that already needs a second job to live. Add on top of everything that we have half our clients asking for discounts too or complaining about prices. There was a study done showing that the average US vet gives away $60,000 in services PER YEAR. We are doing everything we can to make things more affordable.

Here we have two types of dogs 

gettingvetted here.