What is it with Vets and Birds???

[tia]

I hope you people out in the lower 48 states have better luck with vets looking at birds. The visiting vet I was taking my duck to left and one of the two vets we have won't look at the duck and the other one said she would look at it tomorrow but neither know to much about birds. I am hoping that she will give my duck some antibiotics and figure out what is going on. I never realized that vets didn't look at birds. That is very sad.

 

[duckluck]

Don't bet on us having better luck...depends on where you are and who you see. I lost my best Amazon even with some of the best vet care available in the area...$1300 later and I had to put him down after 3 months of pretty heavy daily care. The first emergency vet that looked at him was a real tussle...the vet that was supposed to be waiting at the clinic for him left before we came in with him...and the idiot I got stuck with took 20-30 minutes messing around before giving him a shot! I finally got snotty with her and asked her "Do you want me to give the shot too? It's obvious you can't handle birds already...I might as well do all this myself!" I refused to pay for anything but the shot since I did basically all the work myself! The next vet was better but they still couldn't figure out what was wrong with him and we wound up having to euthanize him over 3 months later. Had one consultant wanted to do hugely expensive surgery on him...on a 45 year old parrot, without even knowing what was wrong!

So when all you guys on here read me being snarky about vets, I'm pretty entitled to it. This is just one instance where I have tried to provide good care and gotten raked over the coals for big money for it and still wound up with a dead animal or one that was just this side of the grave and had to be put down. There have been other instances too. I provide pretty darned good care at pretty hefty expense for my animals but really good vets are in really short supply, if you can find them at all. I have a good horse vet and sure wish he would extend his practice to more species.

 

[onthespot]

Don't feel bad. I took my first hen with fowl pox to a very well known avian vet, (luckily a half mile down the road) and they had no clue, scratched their butts, googled them selves blind for about fifteen minutes and charged me around a hundred bucks. She got over it on her own. I got a hundred dollar lesson.

 

[CityChicker]

I know it's frustrating. Avian vets are extremely hard to find. We are very spoiled here in Colorado because we have a few of the best in the country. I don't know that they treat poultry though. Pets birds are very expensive to treat if you go to an actual Avian vet. Plan on it being at least $1,500 whenever you have a sick bird. There are a number of things that make the process more difficult including that birds do not often show prominent distinct symptoms. Pet birds a lot of time don't show ANY symptoms until they are at death's door. Even then, the symptoms are often ambiguous and disease screening can be an absolute fortune (although there are a number of labs that will work direct with pet bird owners).

Anyway, it is frustrating on multiple levels. Finding an Avian vet that works with poultry/waterfowl is even more difficult. There are vets that do (even becoming an Avian vet is several more years of school though), but most Poultry vets work in industry not with private owners. All that said, vets don't make a lot of money. They really don't. For the amount of education required, they make pathetically little money.

 

[destinduck]

well said CC

 

[DuckDuckGuinea]

I live in NC. Usually the vet school at NC State will take the most difficult of cases, however they will not take ducks. I don't understand it.

 

[duckluck]

Quote:
I don't know, CityChicker, we're going to have to agree to disagree on that one...having been through 5 years of school and paid off my college loans myself, having a neighbor who went to vet school and knowing some of the inside info that I do, IMO they make quite a bit of money. The markup on the pharmaceuticals is phenomenal, for one. Vets/clinics can pay .89 or less each for those rabies shots we all pay so much for, and that's just one small example! I'd say it depends on the situation and if they work out of a clinic that hired them or alone. Doctors in private practice make quite a bit, but they also have to figure in how little peace they may get if the phone rings in the middle of the night. Plus you have to figure that they are going to have to pay out a *lot* less towards medical malpractice insurance than a human doctor!

I know of one university alone that takes in at least 1100 vet school applications a year and only has 80 seats available per year. People wouldn't be vying so heavily for those seats unless there was serious money to be made. Though the seats generally least sought after are those of Food Production Animal vet. So therein lies the problem for us folks seeking help for our poultry. We have to be our own vets much of the time.

You also have to figure that there are a lot of people out there that wouldn't pay to go to the doctor for themselves but are willing to pay beaucoup bucks for help for their precious pets. And believe me, the veterinary community knows it. I don't know of anywhere that does low-cost tetanus or flu shot clinics for horses, though many of us would load up our horses and travel a reasonable distance for it.

That said, I'd say that there is an argument to be made for timing as well: college is more expensive now than ever before, and more demands are being made of veterinary students to have some prior experience with animals before being given admission to vet school. Good grades are not enough anymore like they were in the past in some places. I'd say people who went to school for it years ago will benefit most, because the costs have increased so much in just the past couple of years and their overhead for education and start-up will have been considerably less than a student entering the profession now.

 

[CityChicker]

Yes, definitely the tuition is a killer. Vet school is indeed very competitive as well. I just don't know if I could ever make a go of it if I end up going that route. The pay is just too little. I don't know how people can leave school with a couple hundred grand in student loans for a job that starts at about $55,000 a year. In a lot of places, nurses make more than that and that requires less than half the education. Dental school is the same length of time as vet school and you can easily make at least $100,000 your first year. I think that going into veterinary medicine has to be for the love it, not to make money. I may still apply to vet school after I complete my Master's, but I have serious reservations about it given the salaries. In actuality though, poultry veterinarians (if I wanted to go that route) are one of the better paid specialties. Again though, the jobs are in industry not in private practice.

 

[Duck_feeder]

You can narrow down your search by starting with a list of vets that specialize in birds. Here's a link to the Association of Avian Veterinarians. They have a vet search database on their website.
http://www.aav.org/

 

[Cerelia]

Thank you, DF, for posting that link. I used that link last week with our rescued duck. First I called my regular vet..."we don't take ducks." They gave me a number to another clinic (who actually had "Bird" in their name) who also said they didn't take ducks. I used an avian vet off the list, over an hour away. She was wonderful. Her receptionist grilled me, however. "Is this a pet duck? She will expect payment upfront."

Yikes.