Non predatory thing then is to help the owner to put the pet down painlessly and quickly for reasonable price. Without guilting the owner into 10000 operation.
> The incident involved a four-month-old German Shepherd puppy who'd swallowed a skewer and needed emergency surgery life-saving surgery. The cost of the complicated procedure and after care was close to $10,000 – more than the owner could afford. As a last resort, to avoid euthanasia, the clinic offered her the option to surrender the puppy to a new owner who could cover the cost.
What is a reasonable price? Unless someone is familiar with pricing from multiple vendors for some period of time, how could one know a reasonable price?
$10,000 feels high at first glance but consider the size of the skewer compared to a small animal. There is likely damage done to other areas including major internal hemorrhaging which is not super straight-forward to track down completely (even in humans). If the skewer was single-use bamboo (which I suspect given how much wood will retain food smell and how puppies love destroying garbage cans), the puppy would have likely chewed on it a bit causing splintered mess internally.
This would result in a multi-hour procedure with at least 2 surgical staff (surgeon and tech) and anesthesiologist (due to the complicated nature of this, we can’t have the animal regurgitating as well as active life support monitoring). In addition to the standard tools, they would be using X-rays, dyes, internal (dissolvable) sutures, etc. Internal organs would be mended, stomach fluid would need to be removed from the abdominal cavity, and there would be at least 12 hours of monitoring post op.
Expensive, yes, but I don’t think it’s that unreasonable unfortunately.
TFA links another article explaining the $10,000 bill is a combination of $3,000 of completed tests the original owner had already paid, the surgical procedure, and aftercare costs.
Were time not an issue, they could probably take a trip to Mexico, get the operation done for maybe a few hundred dollars, and come back home, all for much less money than the vet was asking. And the reason I think that's particularly relevant is that it's not like the underlying costs really change. That clinic in Mexico is probably importing those drugs and machines from the exact same places. So developing world costs tend to give you a 'raw materials' cost, where all that's left is labor + profit.
If you can’t find someone else to sell to you for less, then yes. Barring broken markets such as due to regulatory capture, etc.
> The point I make is that you might not be able to tell a reasonable price, per se.
>But you can generally tell an unreasonable price.
These strike me as conflicting statements, otherwise I don’t know what per se means.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37846041
> And the reason I think that's particularly relevant is that it's not like the underlying costs really change.
>So developing world costs tend to give you a 'raw materials' cost, where all that's left is labor + profit.
Why are labor costs not underlying costs? How about liability insurance? Real estate?
The point of looking at 'raw materials' cost is that if the costs on top of said raw materials becomes more than the cost of doing business elsewhere (such as in a different country), then one would be wise to do just that. This is the whole reason things like medical tourism exists.
It's not like other countries are getting their machines, medicines, and so on for that much less. It's just they're able to reduce the cost of everything on top of raw materials to the point that one can afford to take a 'holiday' half way around the world, get their issue fixed, and make it back all for less, often vastly less, than it'd cost to do stateside.
Euthanasia might be the only humane option in an x-ray-and-pliers outfit not staffed and equipped to perform such an heroic sort of intervention in the timeframe it would take to succeed.
One thing that does stand out to me is the extreme shortage of people willing to become veterinarians, even at these prices. It seems like regardless of the pricing on the retail end, capable young people considering modern veterinary life are sizing up the entire financial, emotional, educational, and lifestyle bargain and not finding the payoff to be worth it.
That said, I am sympathetic to the idea that modern veterinary practice has strayed too far from the way it’s done in lesser-resourced settings. Maybe it is more appropriate to set aside advanced and expensive medical techniques in favor of more cheaply-educated practitioners, more conventional business hours, simpler tools and supplies, more frequent recourse to euthanasia, and so on.
The blessing and the curse of modern medicine, no? It’s bad enough to have to face death when it feels inevitable, when “all that can be done to save them” is relatively simple and well-understood. Knowing that the same situation might be survivable under different circumstances—with more money, or in a place with the right practitioner, or if we’d just had this particular exotic antivenom in stock, or if the line had been shorter that night, or if we could hire some bioengineers and a lab to custom-tailor a treatment to puppy’s genes… the same death then comes with a lingering feeling of guilt over the possibility that more could have been done.
Quite the opposite I expect you'd see dramatically less euthanasia in the developing world (though a quick search unsurprisingly turned up very little in the way of data). But I think the logic should be clear enough. Pets make everybody's lives better and more enjoyable, but very few people could afford to even think about dropping $10,000 on a puppy. Those prices are just a fast-track to mass euthanasia and depressed vets.
You should open a vet office then. Sounds like you’re well equipped to undercut competition and still make a hefty profit!
Or maybe you’re just making things up. Because we’re talking about an emergency open and close surgery to remove what’s probably a long sharp object with puncturing of the stomach. On a small animal. On immediate short notice (cancel everything else!). It’s going to be difficult with multiple doctors. And it’s going to require a lot of post surgery care.