My Personal Experience with Banfield Animal Hospital

Everybody many not know this, but I am an ardent animal lover and only want the best for my cats and dogs. So when I needed the services of a veterinarian to have a few of my cats neutered that I had adoped from feral land, I did my homework. I mean, I searched high and low on the Internet and made some calls around getting pricing information.

So when I called Banfield Animal Hospital and discovered that the entire price was reasonable, I was very excited, as you can well imagine. So, let me delve into just who Banfield Animal Hospital is, where they are located, what their goals are, and the results of my experience with them.

Overview

Banfield Animal Hospital is a worldwide veterinarian service that was founded in 1955 in Portland, Oregon. They currently have over 750 hospitals in neighborhoods across the U.S. and having in excess of 2,000 veterinarians that provide veterinary care. Banfield hospitals offer everything from a full-range of comprehensive, medical services, computerized medical records, Pet preventive care plans, extended operating hours, and a quality assurance program. In addition, they have their own Optimum Wellness Plans®.

Goals

When Banfield Animal Hospital was established, they prided themselves on having the following goals:

• Giving Pets the same care we want for ourselves

• Making Pet health affordable

• Strengthening the value of Pets in families

• Teaching how better Pet care maximizes lives

• Stopping euthanasia by keeping Pets healthy

• Put simply, treating your Pet like family.

The above information on their goals was taken from their site on their About Us page. There is a full page of information touting their plans for your pet and their services.

Results

Okay, so let’s compare my sister’s and my experience against the goals they list. While I will be quick to assert that not everyone will have the same experience that we did, it hopefully will elicit you to really do your homework and make an informed decision before you use them in your area.

Giving Pets the same care we want for ourselves

Hmmm, let me think about that one for a moment – giving pets the same care we want for ourselves; would I want to have the living daylights scared out of me as soon as I walked into the waiting room? Speaking from Garfield’s viewpoint (yup, he does look like Garfield.), “I was put on the examination table, taken out of the cage, held by my loving mistress, and had the cage noisily lifted over my head, which obviously sent me into hysterics to the point that I scratched my mistress all up.”

Would we say that the technician was caring? No, as a matter of fact, she was scared of Garfield. She did not have a clue of how to put Garfield back into the cage. She tried pushing him back into the cage head first. Picture in your mind, if you will, a splay-footed mule trying to be coaxed into a horse trailer. Tip: upend the cage so that it’s in vertical position with the gate at the top. Grab the cat by the scruff of the neck like the mother did when the critter was a baby and gently lower him into the cage. You will experience much less fuss.

Making Pet health affordable

Huh! We called Banfield previously on the phone to find out what the cost for neutering and getting first shots for two 7 ½ month old male kittens would be and was told $150.00 each. We asked this same question a number of times and always given the same answer. This would cover EVERYTHING!

What a surprise my sister had when she actually took them in to have this procedure done. Oh no, they told her. It is $700.16 for both. When she questioned why it wasn’t the $150/each for each cat, they said “Well, I don’t know who would have told you that; our price is…”

My sister came home and showed me the receipt. Showing was that their regular fee for neutering both cats was $1,964.91, so why didn’t they quote me this price on the phone instead of $150.00 X 2? Not only was the pet health not affordable, they charged two arms, two legs, all ten fingers and ten toes….!

Here is another picture for you – picture office personnel with dollar signs in their eyes.

Strengthening the value of Pets in families

All I’m going to say here is that by the time you walk out of the office with your beloved pets, you could wonder what possessed you to have pets at all.

Teaching how better Pet care maximizes lives

I can’t even begin to tell you my thoughts on this subject. First, I was told the kittens HAD to have rabies shots and feline leukemia as it was the law. I questioned this, but they insisted this was so. I told them these were house cats and never roamed out free, but they insisted these shots had to be given due to the law. When she got home, I researched this and found this to be very misleading. The state of Arizona does NOT require rabies or leukemia shots to be given to felines.

Here’s another thing. I do not consider being required to sit through a ten-minute advertisement for their Optimum Wellness Plans® to be teaching; I call it badgering. Enough said.

Stopping euthanasia by keeping Pets healthy

What an impressive goal to have. Unfortunately, this did not apply in our case. As we all know, we are constantly being warned about the swine flu, and told to stay home from work, away from large crowds, etc. Yet when my sister was ushered into a room, picture a doctor entering the exam room coughing, sneezing, eyes running, and nose dripping like a faucet. Gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling about the possibilities of stopping euthanasia by keeping pets healthy, right? 

Let alone that you could get sick, you could take the virus home to your family for them to get sick. Think your cat is safe because it can’t get the swine flu? Think again folks – get an update on 2009 H1N1 Flu Virus Outbreak as it pertains to cats. The American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) has just updated their website with new information, published just a few days ago.

Put simply, treating your Pet like family

If you really want to treat your pet like a member of the family as Banfield aspires to do, then do your homework. If five people read this article and make an informed decision as to whether Banfield Animal Hospital is the right choice for veterinarian services for their pet, I will be a happy camper indeed. My animals mean the world to me; don’t yours?