Episode 22 - Where Have All The Good Vets Gone? Helping Puppy Owners Navigate the "Corporate Takeover" of Vet Medicine

9/26/2024

This week’s podcast is a fan request about the concerns one breeder has about the “corporate takeover” of veterinary medicine and how that is affecting her puppy owners:

“What information and resources do you use to help your puppy buyers, especially new/first time dog owners, screen and select a veterinarian?

In the past couple of years, and seems like more lately, I get these questions from my puppy buyers that their vet told them something that ranged from harmless but not really accurate to so aggressively incorrect it felt like a scam and even a danger to the puppy. I know stuff can get lost in translation, I know some medical professionals are better than others, and I know vets and their staff are stressed and overworked. But I also fear the rise in this issue is related to venture capital takeovers and it's going to get worse…

Since it feels like a trend, and especially because I have a breed suitable for first-time dog owners, I would like to be more organized and proactive in providing information on how to vet a vet. I appreciate everyone's thoughts and suggestions.

PS - maybe this would be a good podcast episode?”

In this episode I explore:

How the corporatization of vet medicine affects puppy owners
Coaching puppy owners to advocate for their puppies at the vet’s office for routine care
Finding a good vet when there’s a major veterinary problem with a puppy or dog.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts, and subscribe so you never miss an episode!

To read the transcript for this episode, click the link below.

EPISODE 22 - Transcript

I'm Jane Messineo Lindquist, and this is a Puppy Culture Potluck podcast. You bring the topics, we bring the conversation.

Today's topic is a fan request, and I'm going to go ahead and just read you the post.

What information and resources do you use to help puppy buyers, especially new and first-time dog owners, screen and select a veterinarian? In the past couple of years, and it seems like more lately, I get these questions for my puppy buyers that their vet told them something that ranged from harmless but not really accurate, to so aggressively incorrect.

It felt like a scam and even a danger to the puppy. I know stuff can get lost in translation. I know some medical professionals are better than others and I know vets and their staff are stressed and overworked. But I also fear the rise in this issue is related to venture capital takeovers, and it's going to get worse.

I provide information about food, core lifestyle vaccines, flea and tick, advocating for your puppies. All of those things. I am not wildly out of the mainstream with my recommendations. I am grateful my puppy people check in with me about things that seem weird to them so we can talk through it. But I worry about what's happening that I'm not hearing about too, since it feels like a trend, and especially because I have a breed suitable for first time owners.

I would like to be more organized and proactive in providing information on how to ‘vet’ a vet. I appreciate everyone's thoughts and suggestions.

P.S. Maybe this would be a good podcast episode?

Okay. This is me again. I think you have to separate this question out into two parts. Part one is how do we empower our puppy owners to advocate for themselves when it comes to routine veterinary care?

And the second part is how do we help our puppy owners find a competent veterinarian for true medical needs? If there's something wrong with the puppy or the dog, how do we find a good veterinarian that's competent for this?

So let me take part one of this first, which is teaching our puppy owners to advocate in routine situations.

I don't think this poster is wrong that there is an increase in veterinarians in a corporate setting kind of selling stuff a lot more than they used to. And I know this because from my inside conversations with vets who've been in these corporate situations, they're given quotas. They're given all kinds of metrics that they have to meet. And indeed, they are, a lot of times, recommending things because they've been told to recommend those things.

So that is definitely a concerning trend where profit centres are dictating what your veterinarian is recommending more than what the veterinarian would normally recommend.

But, you know, that's not really a difficult problem to solve as a breeder. This is where and why I wrote the ‘Be Your Puppies Advocate’ booklet. And I give specific direction to breeders as well as to puppy owners there that you need to have your routine protocols in writing; how you want that puppy fed, what vaccinations you want the puppy to have, the worming protocols, whatever peculiarities of your breed.

You want that all in writing and you want to put that in the hands of your puppy owner so that when your puppy owner goes into the vet, they can just say, look, I don't know, this is what my breeder said. And wow, I signed a contract with my breeder. I'm sorry. I mean, I, I'd love to consider what you're suggesting, but I really can't. It would be in violation of my contract and, well, here it is. Here's, here's the protocol.

Takes the heat off the puppy owner puts it on you. And I also encourage my puppy owners to give the veterinarian my phone number if they want to discuss it with me.

Any time there's going to be any major suggestion of anything for this puppy, I make it very clear to my puppy owners they need to call me.

Any medical procedure. I mean, a lot of people wrote in in response to this that as breeders, they'd gotten phone calls from puppy owners, where the puppy owners have been told all kinds of wacky stuff that needs to be done to their dog that were completely unnecessary. So with routine veterinary care, I do think that we can sidestep these issues.

Okay. Yes, they are selling maybe more things than they used to, but it's kind of harmless because you can head it off at the pass as a breeder as long as your puppy owner has their core protocols in writing from you and also understands and will call you if there's any kind of major medical procedure that is suggested to them.

But I think the point here is that you do have to be involved in this process with your puppy people. And I think that the question that the original poster had was, how can we help them find vets where we won't have to be involved in this way? And I don't I don't think that's really possible. I think this is part of the service you provide being a breeder.

And I think it's really important that you be part of that advocating for that puppy. And, you know, that's, that's regardless of this whole corporate takeover of the veterinary industry, it's always been that way. You've always had to help your puppy owner advocate for themselves. I remember my first own puppy that was mine and I was 30 years old.

I mean, I wasn't a young woman. I was an attorney. I was certainly an assertive person. And I went to a vet, an avuncular, sweet man who was so nice to me and kind to my puppy until I got to the part where he wanted to give rabies and a five way vaccine at the same time. And I said, oh, yes my breeder said, don't give those together, so we'd like to do this and this and the man turned on me.

He said, Oh, I'm glad to know that the breeder is no better than the vets now. And I was horrified to this day, and I'm quite a bit older than that now. I remember the moment. It was just terrible.

I had the gumption to stand up for myself, but it's difficult. And that was way before there was any kind of corporate anything. So look, you've just, as a breeder, this is part of what we have to take on. So we have to be involved in this process and helping the puppy owners advocate for themselves. There is a whole psychology to this for the puppy buyer.

That's why I wrote the ‘Be Your Puppies Advocate’ booklet. But at the end of the day, we do have to be there as breeders to help be the puppy owners backbone in this situation.

The second part of this problem is more difficult to address because there just aren't a lot of competent anythings in this world. I mean, when you get a good plumber, doctor, dentist, carpenter, you hold on, you cherish those, those great tradesmen and professionals.

It's not anything to do with the corporate takeover that's causing incompetency. It's just that there aren't a lot of really good anythings, particularly when it comes to being a good diagnostician. That's something that requires intelligence and experience that not every vet is going to have. So my situation is different than the original poster. I get the original posters is, is placing a breed where, she's probably placing them geographically far from where she lives.

And they're also first time puppy owners. That's almost never the case with us. We tend to place puppies in our immediate geographic area and they tend to be not just experienced dog owners but experienced in our breed. So for my puppy owners, I got no problem with their going to their very local vet for things like vaccinations or routine veterinary care.

But if there's ever anything, even a question of anything wrong with that puppy, I want them to make the drive up to my vet doctor Lovell here in Sussex Animal Hospital. I had a situation just recently with a puppy. He was a year old at this point. They kept saying to me, he's got allergies, and they would send me pictures of him and I saw that he had red skin and they took him to the vet.

The vet didn't want to give allergy medicine to the puppy because he's too young and it was going back and forth. And I kept asking and they kept saying, well, it's getting a little better. Finally, I went down to see the dog to train him for show training, and I was horrified. The dog was bald. I said, forget it, game over.

You're coming up to doctor Lovell, did not take doctor Lovell five seconds to say this dog has mange. Okay. One pill, it was gone. But meanwhile, these puppy owners, this dog had been suffering and they'd spent hundreds of dollars. Not to mention all the unnecessary allergy medication and antibiotics that the dog had been taking.

I have had puppies die because the owner took them to an emergency vet and the emergency vet did not run basic diagnostics on the puppy.

I have saved the lives of puppies where the puppy owner went to the vet and the vet sent them home with anti-nausea medication and I told the puppy owner, Turn around, go back to the vet, demand these diagnostic tests.

I think to be fair, you're asking a lot of these emergency vets to understand breed differences and to understand, for instance, that if it's a bull terrier and it's not taking treats and it's nauseous, it's not a teething issue or a little something that the dog's going to get over. There's something profoundly wrong with this puppy.

In another breed, it may be a very reasonable course of action to wait and see, but not in our breed. But again, this points up the idea that the breeder always, always, always has to be involved. Any time there's any kind of medical question involving the puppy.

I don't think there's any way that you're going to educate a first time puppy owner to navigate this situation and find a good veterinary.

And I think it's something that you have to use your network of breeders in your breed, preferably, and help them find a veterinarian in their neighborhood. I think you have to give them as much as possible in writing regarding routine care, feeding and medication. You have to teach them to stick to their guns or at least call you before they do anything that's at variance with your recommendations and I think you have to be really clear with them that they need to call you any time of day or night if they truly think there's something wrong with their dog.

And apropos of that, if you have ‘do not disturb’ on your phone, make sure that it's set so that any of your puppy owners will come through and your phone will ring if they call you in the middle of the night. Because that tragic situation where we lost a puppy because an emergency vet sent home the puppy with nausea medicine, when the puppy had something going on inside that needed surgery. I never got that call because I had do not disturb on my phone. Very hard way for us to learn that lesson.

So there was a lot of great conversation around this post. Let me read you some of these comments.

This poster said, Thanks. This is pretty much what I'm doing now. Getting referrals from other people worked well until about 2020 and now I keep running into places that aren't taking new clients. So we're left looking for someone who is.

A number of people did write that in that the good vets often are not taking new clients. I do think that's changing now. Things are opening up a little bit more, but you know, all the more reason to be proactive and help your puppy owners. I know with my own vet, I have my puppy owners when they call, tell my vet it's one of my puppies so that I know that my puppy owner will be accepted as a client.

Ah, now here's something from the other side. And it's it's a good point. This woman says,

This is an excellent question. As a general practicing vet, some breeders have crazy recommendations. But I try to find a common ground and really hear what the breeder is saying and respect that in most cases. Yeah, you know, it's an interesting thing because when I wrote the Puppy Advocate booklet, I did not wade into the debate of what is reasonable as far as breeder recommendations because I was writing the booklet.

From my point of view, it's the booklet that I want to put in the hands of my puppy owners and I know my recommendations are reasonable. But so noted, you know, sometimes the breeders recommendations are not reasonable.

Okay, so here's a breeder writing in.

I'm pretty rural, but luckily we have two old farm vets here that are really good. But when I have puppies going out of the area, it's tough. We wean onto raw, so I tell them to find a vet that supports that. And we don't do lepto vaccine because mom had a reaction and my breed tends to be sensitive to it. So that gives a couple of things for them to see if a vet's willing to listen and work with them or not.

All right. So now here's another one.

On the other hand, this is so interesting to me because I've seen the other side of this issue. Been a vet tech for two decades. And we definitely see breeder recommendations that range from just weird and unnecessary to flat out dangerous. My vet is relatively modern and up to date. For instance, delayed spay neuter and accepts things that might be a little out of mainstream within reason.

The thing is that there are changes and updates that vets are aware of that breeders might not be for example, in my region, lepto is a serious but under-recognized issue. I've seen too many lepto deaths in the past two years and also the vaccine has been changed and is unlikely to cause reactions like the old version. But on the other hand, I definitely see and hear of vets that are not practicing medicine that I would be able to support.

So I understand that aspect as well.

Yeah, I think that, you know, again, it raises a good point about having a good local vet if you can, because I am always in contact with my local vet. He's a resource for me. What's going around? Do I need the flu vaccine for real? Do I need a klepto vaccine? Like what is what are you seeing?

What's coming in? You do need a local vet because the risks can be very local. And like Dr. Leo would always say to me, we live kind of in a bubble here with with very low parvo risk where we are. But, you know, down in Oklahoma, it's, they have parvo all over the place. So what my vet feels is a reasonable course of action is rightly not going to be the same as a good vet somewhere else in the country.

So in sum, you have to be involved. I'm sorry for the original poster. I do think maybe some of the problems that we're seeing are exacerbated by the corporate takeover of veterinary practices and the pushing of protocols for profit margins. But, you know, really, the game has not changed. You know, it all comes down to us. This is part of the vast experience that we have as breeders.

We experience what the puppy owner is going through, if not scores of times, hundreds of times in our lifetimes. There's no way that a first time puppy owner is ever going to be able to assimilate that. And this is part of what we offer as breeders. We have to stay involved.

If you like this podcast, you'll love our new booklet; Be Your Puppies Advocate available at puppyculture.com.

And while you're there, check out our puppy course; With Open Arms and a Level Head: How to Welcome a Puppy into Your Life. Also available through puppyculture.com

Breeders, check out our bulk discounts on multiple copies of our puppy course for your puppy owners.

Well, that's it for this time. Thanks for listening. Bye bye.