Animal Advocacy
You hear about how you have to become an advocate for your own child as a parent, but the same applies for your pets. Recently we adopted a cat and brought her home to discover not only that she had a respiratory virus (that could easily be transferred to my other pets!) but that they'd had some sort of outbreak and several cats had the same virus at the shelter. Um, what? We are supposed to get animals with a clean bill of health! When we took her back three days later (we called on the second day and they said to wait a day), they tried to charge us hundreds of dollars to get her well again. It felt as if they'd given us a sick cat and made US pay for her treatment as a scam.
Thankfully we sorted it out this week and found out that the doctor was new and unaware of the policies of caring for a cat that was still sick after just days of being adopted, and the director thanked us for giving the cat her treatment and paying for what we could. On one hand, of COURSE we're going to do that. (She said some people would just bring the animal back). On the other, you don't adopt out sick animals only to profit off their medicine, either. Some persistent calling and writing got us our answers (and reimbursement) but who knows what others have experienced?
When have you ever had to be an advocate for your pet? How did it go?
Photo courtesy of Wikipedia