Wandering Adventure Party

@gknauss@mastodon.social From top to bottom, #ICE needs to be, at best, jailed, but probavly need to be put up against a wall.

@markwoll@universeodon.com @pluralistic@mamot.fr @cwicseolfor@zeroes.ca

Yeah. When we moved into our house (fall of 2002), there was a very good, independent vet less than 1mi from our house. I had a pair of Bengals when we first moved in, so, that's where I started taking them (and the dogs that we adopted in the years following). It was a great practice …until they got acquired by VCA in 2016 (or maybe 2015). The other than adding the VCA logo to their signage, the changes weren't immediately noticeable. Then we lost a dog to kidney failure in early 2017. When I reviewed her bloodwork from the previous two years' physicals, I saw that there were abnormal numbers for her kidney labs. The vets overseeing her care had apparently not noticed them, at the time, presumably because, since the VCA acquisition, they didn't have enough time to pay attention to the details.

During that 2015-2017 period, they'd also had a high turnover among their treating personnel and their prices spiked. But, due the location, and the fact that being our "regular" vet, we got discounted access to their emergency-hours services. So, we'd just sucked it up. However, we didn't change practices until 2019 when they discontinued the 24hr emergency-service part of the practice. At that point, we had no compelling reason to pay the premium plus the bloodwork-gaff that preceded the 2017 loss of our one dog made me say, "yeah, fuck these guys" and change practices.

Was only recently that I found out that the new practice is also PE-owned. My criteria for selection of a new vet had merely been "not VCA-owned" (and not BanField, et. al.). The new practice wasn't slathered with "chain" logos and appeared to only be a local practice-group (at the time of our switch, they only had two locations). The only reason I found out that our "new" veterinary practice is PE owned is I was speaking with their practice-manager about recent changes to their prescription policies. It was in explaining to her why we'd changed practices that she revealed "for the sake of transparency" that they, too, were PE-owned (thankfully nont VCA). So, yeah, they're on a very short leash, now.

@cwicseolfor@zeroes.ca @pluralistic@mamot.fr Looking at the map for our area, it's depressing how few entries are marked. VCA has bought up most of the practices that were independent when we first moved here. VCA has definitely bad news for local pet owners.