Note To Self

 I sit in the morning inhaling coffee in tiny breaths. Whispering to myself as a calling. A gentle internal reminder just to see if the systems are still running. Neglecting the cylinder count as a small way to permit a flaw here or there. Collateral acceptance snuggled in permissive acceptance. I try to be understanding to the engine that reminds me it is showing its miles.

My Birdie reminding me to relax more than I let myself.

Reality blankets like an insulator. Deep, silencing, unyielding. A tight jacket that hugs back like a finger trap. The more I struggle the harder it embraces. There is no feedback that permits relenting.

..And so I sit quietly. Appearances of acquiescence. A body that ages as the soul stirs lifeblood back in. 

Found on the side of the road with head trauma, blindness, pain and fear.
Her rescuer named her Angel. She, over 5 days, has made an (almost) full recovery.
They remind me that miracles are everywhere if you will let them in.

The daily sequence of hours that exist between coffee at my kitchen table, and the cat purring on my pillow each night are fraught with too many needful souls. Furr-iously feverish with chaos sprinkled atop. It is the life I always dreamt of. The life I felt most honorable, needful, and absolute within. The place where mattering means everything. A shadow of credentials accrediting the mastering of a skill. Those three little letters, punctuated to add significance. Bold, erect, commanding, at the end of the name I was born with. They, well, they were and remain, the epitaph I got to carry my entire veterinary professional career. If you are very fortunate you get to write your own obituary early on, and build that legacy as a path you adorn with good intentions and not feel so burdened by clearing the road for anyone elses foot traffic. 

The professional degree was the bait. But, it brought with it a fear that the years of repetition, the endless one note of the same tune, might produce some degree of boredom.

Stripes, Baby Ketchup, and their girls. Reminding me to take joy in being a part of their story.
There is nothing more that I cherish than being able to see them all grow up together.

The highlights are the same. The stories repeat themselves time and time again. Some with nuances that remind me to be a constant student. Others with a pat of reassurance that practice has brought mastery, and others are a harsh, painful, albeit earned reminders that there is work left to be done. All of the repetition remains welcomed. All of the wrinkles were earned. All of what is behind, ahead and around mine for the pile in my nest. 

P.S. I just celebrated 20 years at Jarrettsville Vet. It's a milestone that I had always hoped to reach. When you find your place you can call it home.

The System Is Rigged In The Houses Favor. The hidden costs that keep rising because the public has no access to transparent pricing models.

The system, i.e., the whole profession of veterinary medicine and all of its affiliates, is rigged in the houses favor. It's a harsh reality for the ever growing mob of pet parents who feel betrayed by the system they rely on for their pets well-being. The vet, the vet hospital, and the profession as a whole, has all of the power. Power can come in many forms, with many faces, but, the most powerful will always remain with those who control the emotional, mental, physical, and financial survival of those who do not. Power of that kind is totalitarian. Power like that has collapsed civilizations. Made extinction a reality. Power like that is dangerous beyond measure. 

Serafina. My daily reminder of my WHY.

Whilst some would say the house of vetmed has always has been rigged, I would add that is was, at one time not too long ago, centered on providing care that was utilitarian/agrarian based, not emotionally based. When that shift to companion based pet vs. food/livelihood based animals happened, and our four legged friends became bedfellows, the whole construct of vetmed shifted with it. Vetmed promoted, marketed, and richly profited from the elevation in pets status to highly valued family members. For an ever increasingly large section of humans our pets are truly the only thing we consider to be our children. We brought our critters inside our homes, gave them their own beds, and now we buy them their own gourmet food, sold by tv personalities, whose nutritional content often surpasses our chik-burger-plastic-wrapper-fast food convenient daily meals. Our pets have social media pages, monogrammed Christmas stockings, and matching family holiday outfits. We do not hide the fact that we spoil, spend and love them. We hug, kiss and fret over their happiness and health. We do not see them as property any longer. We see them as individuals we protect and advocate for. This whole pet based relationship has swung from livelihood based to heartfelt. This relationship with our pets, well, it became deeply, personally, and life-changingly, emotional. 

Pets are, in many of my clients lives, (mine being no exception), the cornerstone to the joy in their day to day lives. We are so emotionally anchored to our pets that we will do anything to maintain their health as a reflection of the happiness they bring to us. There is no doubt that the loss of a pet hurts as much, and in many cases more than, the loss of many of the humans in our lives. We depend on them this much. As society grows more open via our handheld phone based computers and the endless flow of social content, we have become less social with humans and more satiated with our pets presence. Many of us went into vetmed, pet hoarding, animal rights/rescue/advocacy, back yard farming, and the like, to seek refuge from the harshness of people. Many of us just like animals better than people. People are painfully messy, and awkwardly sticky creatures whilst pets are perfectly ours.

The relationship we have with our pets is hugely impactful and elaborately delicate. This deeply adoring relationship has lead to a pet care market with ballooning revenues. Over the past two decades pet care based services have doubled to reach 5.8 billion dollars annually in the USA. This degree of growth has spawned a hailstorm of erupting opportunistic pet centered ventures.  It has led to financial gains of which we have never witnessed before. When vetmed transitioned from veterinarians in muck boots over green coveralls with its after 2 am $50 field calls to look at downed cows in far off fields, to multi-million dollar practice owners working for shareholders dividends. With this the emotional well-being of patients and their people morphed into economically driven profit-mongering options. When money like this influences lives there are few exceptions to compassionate driven care. The practice will make money on your pet even if it is just in euthanizing them, again for a healthy profit. Lives are disposable, replaceable, property. Lives, no matter how impactful to the people anchoring the other end of the leash, are collateral damages. Vetmed has been reduced into heartbreaking too often economically based treatment decisions to protect profits. Pet care has gotten itself so profitable that the cloying underbelly has grown greedy, ugly and insatiable. As the cost of care continues to skyrocket upwards, (be mindful they are not done yet), it will continue to shatter countless more lives along the way. 

Teddy.. and her dad,, who adores her

The once single doctor practices have grown into large multi-doctor hospitals. It used to be that your vets face was the face of the mission and purpose of the practice. You knew them and they were approachable and accountable for your pets care. Today, many practices are owned by someone, or a board of someone's, you will never meet, nor even be told about. Today practices are sold in the dead of night to people who live in bank accounts of billionaires. Today your pet is an asset in someone else's portfolio to be traded, sold, or squeezed at their discretion. This is what property bears. 

Many of the larger vetcare centers are being bought up by venture capitalists who now own much of the ER's and specialty clinics, (the really big money makers), which has created the foundation for a monopoly, (and been prosecuted for such), and escalated the cost of care in the process. The profession has lost its clients trust. We have lost the ability to communicate between the conflicts of property vs morality. And, we are unapologetic about our contributions to these dilemmas we have gotten ourselves into. Veterinarians are seeking never before conceived of compensation packages and being lured with multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars sign-on bonuses. We do so this a bravado that justifies as being "long overdue" without reflection on how this impacts our patients. To pay for these sign-on bonuses AND the formidable huge dividends the share holders require, the cost of everything they haven't conceded already has escalated to compensate. The latest, and not at all surprising escalation, is happening in the lab services department. Lab services is another way we can hide and escalate a cost and you won't know the difference, or be able to price shop elsewhere. The house is hungry, and the house needs more cash to keep the belly of the beast quiet. Lab services is that ever growing line items list after your pet is examined and before they are treated. Lab services in my veterinary hospital is the fat I trim to treat a patient before the finances are exhausted and economic euthanasia is the only affordable option left. Lab services is the BS the profession utilizes as "standard of care" to make our pockets deeper and your shame as a failed pet parent suffocating. 

The new found profits of vetmed has led to advancements of diagnostic and treatment options. These benefit our clients and patients immensely. While we all share much of the same biology and physiological functions, we now share the same human based treatment options. There are truly no boundaries to what we can treat, or do, when it comes to our beloved pets. While this is miraculous to the desperate pet parent seeking novel care options it is an ethical black hole of queries conjured previously only for sci-fi movie plots. (Go watch Altered Carbon, Jurassic Park, The Island, or Google Top Clone Movies). Unfortunately, this fact has also gotten lost in the quest for profits. We don't talk to our clients to understand who they are, and what their pet means to them. We are medical centers of unbiased, automatons who deliver estimates on paper two and three pages long. We don't start at the clients wishes and hopes, we start at our most profitable. We do not practice best medicine, we practice stockholder strategies. We take people at their most vulnerable and we shame them into spending more than most of them can, without regard to all of the myriad of ways we can both help heal and give clients a way to afford the minimum diagnostics to make the treatable affordable. The whole premise for providing people assistance in navigating a medical dilemma is rigged and stacked in our favor. We know it, we refuse to admit it, and we profit egregiously from it. It is power than euthanizes without hesitation nor culpability. 

Pocket. All two pounds of her. Her mom is protective
and gushingly devoted.

There isn't one veterinarian who wasn't taught to practice medicine via an understanding of a minimum database, and yet we are all collectively mute as a consortium so as to not tilt someone else's profitable apple cart as they try to make every patient visit as lucrative as possible. All in the name of "best practice." If our best practice is letting treatable pets die because we conveniently forgot to have open honest discussions at the collection of history and examination time, and not the long pregnant expectant pause of seeing if the client bites at the first (and let's be honest, always highest) estimate, then we are the problem regardless of how treatable the solution is. We must own this. In my opinion this is the fact that is killing us.

The house has you because you have nowhere else to go. The house also gets you at your most vulnerable for the most painful of all of the decisions you will have to make. Oh, and yes, we know you are out of your area of expertise, at the mercy of our prices, and without options to argue or negotiate (or at least you feel you are). I hear this over, and over, and over.

Birdie. My kitten who had to be quarantined for 4 months after her sibling tested positive for rabies.
How many of us would quarantine two kittens for four months while worrying about rabies?
The story here.

"It was midnight. My vet wasn't open. I didn't know what was wrong with my dog and I couldn't let her suffer until they opened the next morning. They took my dog to the back. They came out and gave me a paper with a dollar figure I was afraid might be the only way to save my pet. My head was spinning. I couldn't understand any of what they were saying. There seemed like no other options. I love my dog." 

My YouTube channel here. 

You can hear this example repeated by the thousands via the people who post on my YouTube channel, blog, or reach out to me directly. I know there are thousands more who have had the same experience. The house has you. You feel it, and you are so emotionally conflicted you cannot make sound decisions.

For all of these scenarios I ask two things; who did you talk to, and what did you sign? (More on this topic to come).

We, the collection of veterinarians who guard the gate to your pets access to veterinary care, will not permit passage without a price of admission that we see as suitable for the access to our healing hands. The house has the power. Your pets are still considered "property" under the law, and now that VC's are collecting record breaking revenues it's not going to concede or have a conscious awakening until the public forces their hands, challenges their intentions, or just plain old innovates a way out. It is the fundamental crux of every problem our patients suffer and die from. The house needs to start working in the patients favor, and that alone will be our collective salvation. 

Mavis and her mom. Didn't every vet go into vetmed because we were this kind of kid?

While the rest of the fringes of our profession taut insurance, third party billing, pet care wellness plans, low cost spay-neuter-vaccine clinics, and the transition of for profit to no profit as being the answer I will stand here firmly on my 20 years of private practice ownership and tell you that every time you think you alleviate one part of the dilemma another part shifts away from affordable while it drags accessibility with it. The system is rigged. It will remain this way as long as three things remain in place;

1. Pets are considered property. 

2. Pet care does not need to be open or transparent in its pricing. This is protected by every state veterinary medical board. What they fail to protect consumers in is their availability to be given options outside of the ER at 2 am. Someone should be addressing this.. see Pawbly.com

3. People in society continue to be as hateful, divisive and uncompassionate as we have become. The greater the divide in our empathy for one another the more we will turn to our pets for emotional refuge. We all are pet loving people. It is time to remind ourselves this.

This girl was the first girl who required a whole lifetime of my courage to intervene on her behalf.
Courage only matters when the cost calculation requires you to put someone else first.
Here's to all of the other Sadie's out there who never get what they need because a veterinarian isn't brave enough to put there license where their mouth is.

While I will not argue that vaccinations and spaying/neutering are not vital to preserving your pets health, I need to remind you that the care you receive in a well, young healthy state are not the things that are likely to cause you to be forced to chose euthanasia as the only economically feasible treatment option available to you at 2 am. As the cost of care climbs into the stratosphere where only private billionaire rockets can take you there will only be three options left;

1. People elect euthanasia because it seems the only affordable option available and we need to feel good about giving up by labeling it "ending suffering". (Please see my article on the Power Of Consent below).

2. As the vetmed sector grows profitable it attracts investors. Investors are about one thing, profits. When you tilt the service of care into profits there is shrinking margins for compassion. Where one revenue stream drives up (pharmacy, food, preventatives) another is exploited, today lab services, tomorrow surgical intervention/specialties. 

3. People get their hearts shattered by the system that holds their emotional glue together and in its grip, and they never get another pet again. The damage has been done to the point of extinction.

There are often numerous low cost options for the lowest hanging fruit at affordable and even accessible costs, (spay/neuter clinics and vaccine clinics.. all high volume and therefore competition based low cost), but you pay for that with the loss of something you will need far more down the line like that emergency 2 am pyometra surgery. That cost has gone from expensive ($1500-$2,500 a decade ago to $18,000 at one clinic I saw).

Tilly after her spay. She was surrendered because she had four blind puppies.
Her breeder gave her up when she was no longer profitable.
She deserves better, she will get it. We will make sure of that.

In the last decade the veterinarians have lost two key pieces of our revenue pie. We lost our solitary foothold on in clinic prescription medications and preventatives to the likes of 1-800-online and then food to chew-on-me and I'll send you a painting when your pet dies, who can provide these at lower cost and still never have to go to vet school. Vets conceded an easy 30% of our revenue stream to innovators outside of our profession. Over this time a cascade of vet care specialists blossomed. For the benefit of our patients many once in clinic services are now farmed out to vet specialists; think cardiology, neurology, surgery, dermatology, and general practitioners have lost another big money piece of the pie. 

There is a lot of self-justifying puling these days on the vet forums. They all too often are intended for the clients we have failed, and, therefore are likely falling on deaf ears. We have tried to seek empathy for our suicide statistics. Others beg for understanding wrt our over crowded exam rooms and appointment scheduling access. A few spew a banter to remind parents that "pets are a responsibility/privilege, not a right." Which is my personal favorite. I feel it is quite likely the most obnoxiously hateful based arrogance ever muttered. We love animals as much as our clients do. Why would we ever use that as fuel? Now there is an article being circulated to compare the cost of a human knee surgery to a dogs. Can we reiterate the cost of medical liability, lifespan, and macrophagic greed going on with our counterparts on the human side? Why are we so intent on justifying costs when we have boatloads of data that support the fact that if you want to call property "property" (i.e. limited liability and we can all dispose of our pets anytime we want to, which vets will defend until their dying breath). It is not a valid comparison for so many reasons I feel we are ever obvious entitled morons to share it.  If any of us can remember that we are all here to "solemnly swear to use my scientific knowledge and skills for the benefit of society, through the protection of animal health and welfare, the prevention and relief of animal suffering," then why has it all become about how much money we make and not how can we help each other. They are not ever going to be anything but mutually vital for the other half to survive.

Holy crap the degree to which I can pick this apart.. 🙄

Here's what you can do to have some tipping of the cards in your favor; 

Know who owns the practice. This includes your primary care provider, your local ER, and the specialists you are sent to. If the same group owns the whole lot you should be very concerned about how much you are paying for everything you are recommended. Do you routinely get sent somewhere else for services, especially surgeries? It is not an uncommon practice to have your vaccines and the other most very basic services done at the primary care facility and everything else referred. What is the cost difference for a simple mass removal (and the majority are very simple) done at a private practices office and one been done at a specialty referral surgical facility (hint; about $2,000, or more). If every single pet loving parent walked out of the corporate owned practices the landscape would shift dramatically. For every pet parent who says "I stayed because I like my vet," I need you to ask them what they can do for you when the cost of your emergency care, mass removal care, enucleation, splenectomy, etc is soo astronomically high you have to euthanize your pet. If they say get pet insurance because I like my sign-on bonus more than I like saving savable lives, leave. Being loyal shouldn't mean having your heart broken when you realize your vet isn't on your pets side when it really counts. 

Wellness plans are also stacked in the houses favor. Ask about a Pet Savings Plan that is yours to use where you want it. My clinic offers one through VetBilling.com. Its yours for your pets care, I don't care where you need it.

Three years after the original 52 cats from the hoarding situation we helped with we still have reminders of what giving more than anyone expects can bring you.
More on this here.

I truly believe that good veterinary medicine is about saving lives, not making economic decisions because our student debt is so high and our sign-on bonuses were so grand. The problem does not reside in lack of insurance, lack of empathy for our off shore private vet school debt, our knee surgery costs comparisons, or our lacking reciprocal empathy for how hard our lives are while making shareholders millions of dollars in dividends, but simply in not reducing a treatable life to a replacement value chattel. We are the house. The house owes its residents the oath we took so many years ago.

I am so proud of who we are, and how much we give back.
We are a culture, a mission and we do well by doing good.
We are the heart of vetmed.

P.S. If you would like to have a better understanding of the cost of common lab services please see Pawbly Storylines section. Go to Pawbly.com Storylines.

Jasmine gets a hug after her spay.
Every pet here at JVC is family.

Upcoming topics to discuss: 

• Social workers in vetmed. When the emotional turmoil is so high you don't know what to do. When the emotions get soo overwhelming your adrenaline kicks in. When the system that is supposed to care doesn't you need a friend/ally on the inside to help you. For this reason some hospitals have started to follow the human hospital infrastructure plan and employ a social worker. Someone to help guide your emotional journey without the medical or financial interference and influence. 
• The spawning of "Zero Tolerance" has grown into our new veterinary fight song. Seems everywhere we go in the world these days there is friction. Animosity is borne of broken hopes and unrealized promises.
• What are some of the costs of veterinary care in my private practice?
• What are some of the items you need to ask your vet at your next visit?

What are your thoughts? I would love to hear them. Email me at krista@pawbly.com

P.S. because every time I post one of these I need to add a disclaimer. All comments are posted after approval, and all hate mail posts get posted, or reported. 

If you are a veterinary professional and you don't understand how big the divide is, and how harmful our actions have become please read the comments on my YouTube channel. I have been practicing for almost 20 years. I have never denied care based on cost. While I stand a very strong line on serving my patients above all else I do so with 100% transparency and all options on the table at every single visit. I also do not allow any unkind behaviors towards anyone; patients, staff, clients. This is the ranking in which we serve. Please see my other blogs,, and P.S.S. this blog is appropriately titled. I am an open book,, its not always picture-perfect.

My Circus.... Not Always My Monkeys

There never is adequate seating, nor food, at these venues. Convention halls designed to cluster crowds, and starve you. Their bathrooms hold the same predicament. What they can do well is seat a football stadium of vets on metal folding chairs with towering 100 foot ceilings cocooned by cement erected from framed steel and sheet metal. Veterinary continuing education venues, what we call CE, are almost and without exception (save for the uber-exclusive Swiss chalet-ed "escape" venues no one I know can afford), are inhumanely impersonal, and disastrously like a teen-boy-band concert spread over 4 days. Straggling zombified bodies following a river-like funeral procession, snaking into-out-of-and-around a convection hall labyrinth of gauntleted vendors offering pens, stress balls and poop bags, to-from-and within the stomach of lecture rooms as boring as they are blue carpet and oversized light fixtures humming a electric static lullaby. For all licensed professionals in the medical field they are a necessary endeavor based on a solar calendar.

Saffie, our clinic cat. Midday naptime.
Her story; she had been returned for urinating outside of the litter box three times.
She has now found her home. She is also perfect now that she has us as her humans.

I pack a breakfast, water, coffee and spare square toilet paper bag, along with a spare phone charger, (it takes a blood hound to find an outlet in these places and you don't get reception anyway), and remind myself this is a necessary evil until my prince pays for that plane fare to the land where hot chocolate and banks add an 'e' at the end for that extra panache. And have I yet mentioned that they are also a freezing cold reminiscent of a basement meat locker?

Among the 5,000 fellow vets at this years annual CE event, I found two classmates from my vet school that long 18 years ago. They were best friends at school and not surprisingly, remain so to this day. One of them is a towering giant at over 6 feet. She was, and still is, easily recognized by her ability to be the only face in the crowd above the peppered-hair sea. The periscope face singularly visible anywhere within the swimming crowd. Alongside her was the girl I knew better. The more talkative of the two. The girl who I always personified as an Afghan dog, yet upright. She moved like a slender, Rapunzeled sloth. Slow, yet graceful, waves of long curled blonde hair willowing to and fro, and a look as if drawn to a far off light only she could see. She was sweet, always smiling, and as I will always remember her, had this impressively captivating way of standing in a necropsy lab of 20 or 30 of us listening to the professor drag on and on, answer a question you weren't sure was intended to be asked of the crowd, (always correctly I might add), and then seamlessly slip back into her upright slumber. We, like the geniuses our 20 year old mind were, had diagnosed her with narcolepsy long before she went off and had a single species biped label her. 

Willow,, the face of the Amish puppy mills. Disposable because not sell-able.
She has been adopted via a local rescue. (Have I begged you not to ever buy a pet yet?)

Their vet career paths have run in parallel to their personal lives. They married, had kids, and bought their practices separate and yet in tandem. They have what so many of the rest of us do not; a never ceasing sounding board, experience well, and partnership that is both envious and formidable.

We met over our provided venue boxed lunch. Mine of the vegan variety as it was both preference and provided the only guaranteed availability of anything outside my knapsack smuggle. We, like all old friends, picked right up where almost 20 years had left us. 

We had built lives over the amassed days. They families, and us; collectively three independent vet practices. Which based on the trends of the profession and the newbies of millennials swarming in our convention hall pool, was remarkable. 

Hamilton.
Paralyzed from the waist down,,
and yet remains always a glass half full kinda guy

We started there. The talk of owning our own practice. More intimate than how their children mirrored them was their description of the clinics that they had built. The details of how these buildings, and all of the personal detail it enveloped defined who we are, and had become. Small businesses, and I would nominate; especially those created for animals or children, are exactly like this. A vision that manifests out of passion and empathy. A lifetime of desire to help those without ability to construct independently, and love. We didn't talk about income, profit margins, or retirement/exit strategies, we talked about what that building meant to us in our life long dream of being a veterinarian. We talked about our practices as if they were our professionally status defining custom built luxury yachts. 

The flagship.
Jarrettsville Veterinary Center

I am 10 years older then they are. The prodigal girl who entered vet school a decade later than the rest of my class. The girl who took a 10 year detour into another profession before her compass called her back to where her heart lay. When you are 32 and the rest of your vet school class is 22 that decade delta has significance. I was, for those years at vet school, the older, seasoned classmate. Here cross-legged on the convention floor eating a veggie wrap, I remained such, although even these small differences were quickly fading into insignificance.

The engine. Our treatment and surgery area

"My best piece of advice?" they had asked...was to "be careful for what you wish for, and be ready to have your heart broken." We all want/need an extra vet, or two, (three for me, please), to fall out of the sky and into our laps, but, I paused,,, "no one will break your heart more in vet med than an associate." Eighteen years in, and 12 vets who have come and gone later, and yes, some of them have absolutely broken my heart. "And your staff, well, they can crush you just as hard." We are a profession based on emotional ties. You know your patients won't live forever, but, for some reason you expect your staff to be there always. You cannot build a house around a purpose, with a bleeding heart full of good intentions, and a desperate hope for it to survive both from and after you, without feeling hurt when those people you hand the keys to your yacht to, abandon it, and you,  to leave all of your passions afloat in an ocean of wet noses that need antibiotics and a list of clients trying to make same day appointments cause the ER's are full. 

my circus,,, not always my monkeys.

I wish us all well.

Seraphina.. because there is a heart and a soul,, she reminds me to treasure and protect both

For every journey there is a vessel to carry you. A crew to guide you, and an anchor to help weather the storms. Here is a small tribute to the people at JVC I call my anchors;

The heart of every institution is the crew that guides the way. To all of my peeps at JVC I am so proud of you, who you are, what you work so hard for, and for being as much the inspiration as the joy that makes it all possible. XOXO Krista

My Veterinary Want Ad

 

 

Search Browse Relief Vet Jobs Your Job Alerts Your Saved Jobs 

Keywords

  Search All Locations  Alabama  Alaska  Arizona  Arkansas  California  Colorado  Connecticut  D.C.  Delaware  Florida  Georgia  Hawaii  Idaho  Illinois  Indiana  Iowa  Kansas  Kentucky  Louisiana  Maine  Maryland  Massachusetts  Michigan  Minnesota  Mississippi  Missouri  Montana  Nationwide  Nebraska  Nevada  New Hampshire  New Jersey  New Mexico  New York  North Carolina  North Dakota  Ohio  Oklahoma  Oregon  Pennsylvania  Rhode Island  South Carolina  South Dakota  Tennessee  Texas  Utah  Vermont  Virginia  Washington  West Virginia  Wisconsin  Wyoming  Canada  International 

Location

Show Other Jobs

 Save Job

Veterinarian, FT or PT

Jarrettsville Veterinary Center

 

Details

Posted: 04-Oct-22

Location: Jarrettsville, Maryland

Type: Full Time

Salary: Based on exp.

Categories:

Private Practice

Occupation:

Veterinarian

Species:

Canine

Feline

Salary Details:

We are open to discussing whatever you need.

Required Education:

DVM or equivalent

Additional Information:

2 openings available.

You will find loads of ads offering a myriad of shiny objects to lure you in. The quintessential bowerbird with the nest of flashy, shiny objects. Haven’t we all learned that the courtship only really counts when the days are long and daunting? Haven’t we all figured out that the relationships that matter are the ones built upon trials and trust? Let’s be honest, we all struggle. All of us on the floor, in the trenches, not the executives lurking from above, counting our collection of Brownie badges. 
The real-life vet life happens in the darkest corners of the most heartbreaking days with the cases we lose regardless of how hard the battle was fought. This is where you find yourself the hero of attempts and the victor of intentions that matter. Your greatest triumphs will find you in the most unlikely places and often with the cast of characters you spend your long hard days at work with. This is who we are; small, hometown vetlife America, still fighting for the underdogs of the lost, forgotten, overlooked and voiceless. The heart of vetmed. The general practice that James Herriot made famously spellbinding. I can pitch all the shiny bells and whistles. All the same the corp venture capitalists dangle, but the grit of our success lies in who we are while we struggle. We are a family built on the dreams of saving the lives of the four-legged cats and dogs of Northern Maryland. 
We are a 5 doctor, sa practice w/ amazing staff and never a case we will not help. If you want a shoulder to lean on, a team to support you, and an ever-abundant sleeve to wear your heart on then please consider us. We are looking for a veterinarian to join our purpose. Flexible schedule, you decide what works for you and we will make it happen. No non-competes, and a slew of never heard of before benefits the corp behemoths wouldn’t even conceive of offering. 
We offer a sign-on, relocation, health, 401k, CE, excursion, ownership, no on call, or after hours emergency, and support for whatever makes you you. Come visit, stay as long as you like. We are here for you as much as we are for our patients. 

DVM or equivalent

 Create a Job Alert for Similar Jobs

About Jarrettsville Veterinary Center

We are a small animal private practice where compassion comes first. We are a safe and happy workplace where innovation, accessibility and empathy rise above all else. Tell us what you need to practice the medicine you have always dreamed of. We have an excellent benefits package, full transparency, flexible schedule, and excellent pay. Modern hospital with digital radiography, ultrasound, CO2 and cold laser, digital dental, behavior, acupuncture, Reiki, puppy socials, boarding, and an active supportive community that allows us to do things others think are impossible. For example, financial assistance for care, free boarding in inclement weather, adoption services for when clients can no longer care for their pets, or pass away, and a pet food pantry. We do not provide declaws, cosmetic surgeries, nor economic euthanasia. Think it isn't possible? Come visit and see for yourself. We are here to support you so you can care for our patients. Seeking big hearts and compassionate souls.

Want to know what the independent practice owner are up against? 

Listen to these podcasts;

Freakonomics. Should You Trust Private Equity To Take Care Of Your Dog?

Freakonomics. Do You Know Who Owns Your Vet?

and read about the flashy incentives being dangled in front of vets to try to find an available associate.

Want to know what I think? I think that if you go to a veterinary clinic you NEED to know who owns it? What their motive to be in this space is? And ask your vet if they took a sign on bonus? What has it cost them? What is it going to cost you? What about your pet? 

And when you can't get a life saving surgery, or emergency care done for less than $3,000 to $20,000 ask yourself if you are a part of the problem? If there weren't vets seeking only high ticket items, and clients (knowingly or not) patronizing these platforms (and lets talk about Chewy, online pharmacies and big box stores selling all sorts of pet stuff at below what we can get it for) then maybe your pets "replacement value" is the correct negotiating tool for pet care?

My parting words; Nothing in the history of veterinary medicine is going to claim more lives than corporate take over of vet care. (not any disease, natural disaster, etc. It will be at the hands of pet loving parents having to euthanize their treatable pet because corporate take overs have fixed the prices so high that almost no one can afford them. Talk about breaking a soul. Kill the light of someone's life.