Who could object to a wellness exam? Don’t you care about the well-being of your pet? Yes, of course. That is why you’re trying to get the flea meds, so the poor beast isn’t covered with pestilential biting insects. But the vet won’t give you what you need to spare your pet the torture of being bled half-to-death by a swarm of pestilential, biting insects unless you haul the pet in for that wellness exam first. It is both extractive and insufferable in that it’s a pretext to (effectively) force you to pay for an exam that is assumed to be necessary, regardless of any good reason to believe it is.
I got hit with the wellness exam line when I stopped by the vet who’d seen our dog the previous year. He was two years old at the time and so a young dog and in need of a wellness exam to the same degree that a 12-year-old boy needs a prostate exam. It is extractive and for that reason, despicable. The unstated implication is the pet’s owner is either too dumb or too indifferent their pet’s health to notice something’s off. It used to be considered the owner’s responsibility to keep track of the health – the well-being – of their pet. Now (superficially) the presumption is that the owner is either a fool or he is a mean SOB who doesn’t care about the well-being of his pet and would surely let the animal suffer rather than take him in for a checkup. If so, then why is the owner there to buy flea meds? Why would he care about that but not anything else?
The vets know they have you – the pet’s owner – over a barrel. You are there because you do care about the well-being of your pet. It is not unlike the way doctors for humans have people over a barrel. You need to see the doctor – or the dentist? You have to wear a “mask.” They stopped doing that, most of them. But do you doubt they will one day do it again? Human medicine is extractive to the nth degree. Every last shekel is wring from the “patient” – used in the sense C.S. Lewis used it in his Screwtape letters. Fifteen dollars for an aspirin given in the hospital. Ten grand for that ambulance ride. No wonder there is sympathy for Luigi.
In both the human and the pet medicine world, we are faced with a binary choice: To take care of ourselves (and our pet) by ourselves. Or be taken care of by the extractive system that wants to suck every last drop of blood out of us – all in the name of “wellness.”
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Did that vet push rabies vaccines or other vaccines for your dog? It seems these days, if someone goes to a doctor or takes their pet to a vet for a “Wellness visit”, the doctor or vet they’re seeing pushes drugs and/ or vaccines.
https://pestakeholder.org/media_coverage/private-equity-is-coming-for-your-pets-what-it-means-for-you/
Eventually every vet clinic, every restaurant, every bakeshop, every barber will be owned by one of a handful of companies, much like the news media, the movie industry, the agriculture industry, the meat-packing industry, the arms business, the political system…
You will own nothing, but you probably won’t be happy.