Lack of after hours emergency pet care in some rural areas putting owners in tight spots - Entrepreneur Generations

Astoria, Ore. (Best Places map)

Some rural pet owners facing an emergency are reduced to either driving to an urban center or waiting until the morning to see a local veterinarian, Erick Bengel reports for The Daily Astorian in northwestern Oregon near the Washington border. "It takes a fairly large population center to support around-the-clock emergency clinics. On the North Coast, there simply aren’t enough pet emergencies to justify keeping an animal hospital open through the night."

Five regional vet offices in Clatsop and Pacific counties, which consist of about 58,000 residents, participate in an on-call rotation, with each office deciding on its hours, Bengel writes. Some take calls all night, some until 10 p.m., but the clinics usually do not remain open all night. Dr. Brad Pope, founder and hospital director at Bayshore Animal Hospital, one of the five clinics, told Bengel, "To have a 24-hour emergency clinic open, to pay somebody to answer the phone two times a night, would never be economically feasible." Dr. Dannell Davis, owner of Astoria Animal Hospital added that "the people that have the skills, that are willing to work in the middle of the night—guess what—are expensive. You can’t pay them minimum wage. They won’t do it.”

Which means that pet owners in an emergency most likely have to drive to Portland, which is about 97 miles from Astoria. That doesn't work for pet owners, such as Erin Anderson, who was unable to reach a vet after her cat had a late night stroke and her night vision problems prevented her from driving to Portland, Bengel writes. The cat died.

Anderson told Bengel, “I like the vets here. All the vets are very nice people. I’m not knocking any one of them. I admire what they do. I know it’s tough on a rural area. But it’s tougher on us whose pets die in our arms.” (Read more)

from The Rural Blog http://ift.tt/2h7wnde Lack of after hours emergency pet care in some rural areas putting owners in tight spots - Entrepreneur Generations

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