Same situation here, comparing my vet who has a tiny clinic and small staff. His waiting room is always full of patients and his prices are reasonable. A couple months ago my cat acted sick, but it was my vet's day off. I took my cat to the only clinic in town that had an opening. Nice building, lots of fancy stuff, waiting rooms, etc. They took blood, a brief exam, gave her some fluids under her skin and charged me $400 USD! Two days later she wasn't much better so I took her to my regular vet. He did a thorough exam, urinalysis, additional blood work, antibiotic and steroid shots, and an IV. Cost was half of the expensive clinic and Debbie was feeling better within hours.Yesterday I vaccinated my dog against rabies. He was not bitten, it was just a routine vaccination. This time the veterinarian said to give the injection to the thigh of the leg, and not to the withers. Why i do not know.
We don’t take our dog to the veterinarian, he is not accustomed to a car and generally does not go beyond the boundaries of the site (our site is not very small, there is room for a walk), the parents brought the vaccine from the veterinarian. I didn't think to ask how much it cost. However, this is probably not interesting - I live in Russia, this is a completely different state, and the prices here are completely different, usually much lower.
The veterinarian said that the vaccination can be done once every three years, but if there is a high risk of being bitten by rabid animals, then it should be done every year. Apparently, the effectiveness of vaccines decreases over time.
The vaccination is painful and in addition to it, a painkiller injection is given. However, today the dog is already running quite cheerfully.
To be honest, I haven’t even decided whether to get vaccinated next year or take a break.
In general, my parents brought the vaccine in a thermos with ice, I took it out and vaccinated the dog. The veterinarian can give an injection, but then the dog would have to be transported far by car.
There is also a traveling veterinarian who can come, but, unfortunately, he is an absolute charlatan. There's no point in working with him. He simply goes for money, imitating veterinary work, and prescribes diagnoses and treatments for animals completely randomly. And this, naturally, does not lead to anything good.
In this regard, the situation in Russia is generally strange. From my own experience, I can say the following - if the clinic is located in a cramped and cheap space, and the worker himself, that is, a veterinarian or a doctor (for people) is clearly poor, then this is a very good specialist. If a veterinarian drives around in an expensive car, the clinic itself is a very beautiful building in the center of a city or village - that’s all, this veterinarian will not treat, he will simply take money and invent non-existent diseases in order to take more money. And if you contact him with a small problem, he will deliberately make a big one with the wrong treatment in order to take even more money. In the end, the exhausted animal will have to be euthanized.
The same applies here to dental clinics for people. I treat my teeth in some basement (!) of a residential building, but there is a doctor there with more than 25 years of experience and he does everything very well and for a long time. When I went to expensive, elite clinics, a lot of money was spent, but I only had time to treat my teeth; something had to be redone there all the time. In cheap clinics (here) the approach is different - the doctor does everything as efficiently as possible so that the client leaves and never comes again and doesn’t bother him. Such specialists have a rather different approach; it happens that they are not interested in money at all, i.e. They will do the work, and they will only take money for the materials. But at the same time, they are often quite rude and unfriendly and can read a lot of strict lectures to the client about caring for the health of a person or animal
Such are the oddities of Russian reality. However, I apologize, it’s unlikely that this is interesting, I’m just a little emotional, sharing my impressions.
