11/05/2025
Hello valued clients and friends. Recent events have told me that it is time to once again post on our page about the behavior that is expected of people when they are visiting a veterinary hospital.
You all know that there is almost nothing that I would not do to help you care for your pets. I will answer your panicked call and visit your house on Christmas Eve because your old dog can’t stand up and needs to be seen immediately. I will miss my kid’s regional playoff game because your animal is sick and under my care and if I step away, it may not survive. I will sit with you on the floor and hold your hand and your pets paw as I help it cross the rainbow bridge. I will cry with you, I will laugh with you. I will get to know your family and all of your children four legged or two legged. I will drive 80 miles through a blizzard to help you load your old dog into the car to bring them into the clinic to get care. I will wake up at 1 AM when I hear the phone ring and get your frantic message that your dog ate an entire bottle of its medication and you don’t know what to do. I will fly down the road as fast as I can to get to my clinic because your dog has been hit by a boat, car, bear or whatever, and is going to die without immediate help. I will hold your checks and work with you on the bill and trust that you will pay me even though some of you never do.
However, there are some things that I just will not do. I will not sit idly by and tolerate harassment, bullying or threatening behavior in my clinic. I will not tolerate abuse of myself or my staff in any way shape or form whether it be verbal or physical.
I would like to take this time to remind everyone in the community of several things.
Number one: We are not your punching bags. Having a bad day? Take it elsewhere. Come back or call us back when you’ve had a Snickers.
Myself and my staff are here to serve this community by taking care of the animals in it, whether they be owned or not owned. We don’t care if you are rich or poor, who your parents are, who your grandparents were, what color your skin is, if you have fifty unpaid traffic tickets or three ex wives. What we do care about is your pet and doing what is right for them. Have respect for us and we will have respect for you.
Number two: We work with several different rescues and shelters to promote controlling the pet population. While I make sure that my staff is paid and my supplies are covered, I as a doctor am doing it for free. My time is donated. I do not pay myself anything for doing this. Zero. Nada. Zilch. Every Tuesday of every single week, I donate my time and oftentimes my own money to help homeless animals. I am not personally affiliated with any of these rescues or shelters. I do not determine their protocols or their ages for spaying and neutering the animals in their care. They consult with me, we come up with a plan together that’s in the best interest of the community and the animal itself. Making snide, rude and mean comments to us about spaying and neutering these animals at the ages determined appropriate by the rescues and many university programs and nationally recognized shelter medicine providers is going to get you nowhere but a fast ticket out of my clinic. This is especially true if I have been a doctor for more years than you have been breathing. Please do not confuse your Google research with my 25 years of medical experience and hundreds of thousands of surgeries performed.
Number three: When you are in my clinic, you will act with respect for me, my entire staff and any clients that are present in the building. Being physically and verbally abusive and disruptive is not conducive to the peaceful atmosphere that we strive to create in our clinic for all of the clients and animals in our care on any particular day. If I am in the surgery room performing surgery on somebody’s animal and you are in my lobby yelling and fighting with people, you are putting that pet’s life at risk by distracting me from the job at hand. Throwing objects at my clinic building is also unacceptable behavior.
Number four: Please remember that on any given day, we have probably had at least one and sometimes up to five euthanasias, and there are probably people in the building grieving the loss of their pet. Do you really want to be the person that disrupts this time for them?
Do you want to be the one who calls and yells at the doctor for not getting back to you about your pet’s medication refill while they were helping your neighbor say goodbye to their pet or working to save the life of another animal in their care?
If your phone call has not been answered within a few hours, I can guarantee you it is not because we are on a lunch break (what’s a lunch break?) It’s also not because we’re sitting in the massage chair in the back.(there’s no massage chair in the back) It’s also not because we are napping or playing games on our phones or reading a comic strip out of the newspaper. We work through our lunch breaks, we skip bathroom breaks and if we do not answer the phone or call you back immediately it’s a pretty safe bet that either somebody’s pet is very sick or dying and in need of our immediate attention or we are in the back room cleaning up vomit or some other form of bodily fluids from said pet.
Number five: I cannot control the price of your pet’s medication, prescription diet, shipping cost, flea and tick products, laboratory test or any other tangible expense for your pet. Veterinary clinics are subject to all of the price increases that every other industry has and small clinics like this one will never be able to provide the price breaks that Chewy or Walmart can. But will Chewy or Walmart show up for you on Christmas Eve? Will they sit with you on your living room floor and cry with you? Will they answer your frantic 1 AM phone call? Those few extra dollars we make when you buy your pets medication from us helps allow us to provide the needed services for animals that don’t have homes and for other community organizations and school organizations that we donate to. It also helps to support my staff and their families who live in your own local community. On any given day, we are told by multiple people how expensive it is to own a pet how we must have vacation homes on the beach in Tahiti or a luxury jet somewhere. We’ve been told that we’ve stolen their Christmas or now they can’t afford to buy their children birthday presents because they have to pay for their pets medical care. Stop for a second and think how this must make us feel. Day in. Day out. It is terribly disheartening to always be seen as the Grinch when all you are trying to do is save their pets life. Think before you speak.
Number six: My staff is like my family. We are a very small clinic and I will do everything that I can to create a peaceful and positive work environment for my employees and myself. If this means calling the police or firing clients, this will happen without question. Yesterday we had a very aggressive and rude person in our clinic and it frightened my staff, and that really irritates me. This person threatened and lunged at one of our rescue clients, they yelled and had to be pushed out the door. Once outside, they threw things at the building and called the police. Why? Because they did not want their dog neutered despite having signed a contract and consent form with the rescue. My clinic and employees had nothing to do with this other than providing discounted surgical services. My employees and clients should not be afraid to be here. They should not get threatening curse words on their private cell phone regarding what we do in the clinic with animals. In fact, they should not get any messages on their personal cell phones regarding veterinary care. That is their personal space. Please respect it. 
As a final note, I will leave you with this thought.
I sat at my kid’s basketball game and cried last night.
Not because of the five euthanasias that day. Not because I couldn’t save a pet or because anything bad happened to my patients. Because of the people. Because of the rude phone call accusing me of not caring about their pet (what they didn’t know is that I could not call them back until the next day because we already had a full schedule and we had several emergency euthanasias and several very sick animals to take care of that same day) . Because of the grown adult bullies that probably went home and laughed about screaming and creating a scene at the vet clinic and cussing us out and throwing things at my building. And they’ll probably brag to their friends and family and create a TikTok or facebook post about it. These are local community members who live, work and breathe here. They are your friends, your neighbors. Do better, people.
I am willing to work with you on an individualized care plan for your pet, medical, surgical or whatever it may be. I am willing to work with you on billing options and treatment plans based on what you can and cannot afford. The one thing that I’m not willing to work with you on is a bad attitude. From this point on, any client displaying a poor attitude with myself or my staff, whether on the phone or in person, will be given a warning about their behavior. There will be no second warnings. Your records will be forwarded to the clinic of your choice. There are plenty of other places to go spread negativity, but this clinic is not one of them.
