A news item on CBC Radio last Monday kept me smiling for days.
To be fair, it wasn’t intended to be a funny story. A man complained that he had taken his ailing dog to the vet, who said the animal could be suffering from bone cancer, a diagnosis that could only be confirmed with a bone biopsy. The owner consented.
Later, he got a call that the biopsy confirmed the presence of cancer. The vet had gone ahead and amputated the leg, said the dog still had cancer and would live only several months longer, then presented him with a bill for about $1,000. The owner was furious because he hadn’t consented to the surgery and his dog will spend its last few months healing from the amputation. Not much value for his thousand bucks. Given the option, he said, he would have requested that the animal be euthanized.
The story saddened me even though I am not an animal lover. I do not now, and never have, understood the need or desire to keep a member of another species for my own amusement.
Not that I dislike animals. My son’s family has a wonderful dog that is amazing with our grandchildren and I am happy to greet it and pet it when we visit. But if we arrived at the home one day and the dog wasn’t there I’d have the same emotional reaction as if a table lamp was missing. Or maybe even less, if it happened to be my reading lamp.
I didn’t even take offense when local friends named their new dog after our granddaughter (that’s my version of the story, anyway, and I’m sticking with it, Ann!). They are good people and the dog is beautiful, so more power to them.
I sometimes feel that I might be the only non-pet owner in the Creston Valley and I don’t understand what seems to be a growing obsession — owning just one dog doesn’t seem to be sufficient anymore. It’s pretty common now to see people out walking three or more pets, often each of a different variety, struggling to keep the leashes from spinning them into a cocoon. But I wouldn’t hurt an animal or stand by if I saw one being abused.
That said, the story that first caught my attention has provided me with considerable amusement. CBC Radio contacted the veterinarian in question and she initially refused to discuss the matter, citing — did you see this coming? — “doctor-patient confidentiality”. Somehow, the reporter passed on this tidbit of information without so much as a quaver in his voice. I nearly drove my truck off the road.
I have been trying to picture the professor at vet school who teaches the ethics class. Can’t you just hear the howls (pun intended) from students when they first hear the term “doctor-patient confidentiality”?
“But what if the patient is a crow and it squawks about being mistreated? What if the patient is a parrot and it talks about a crime it has committed? What if the patient is a rodent and it rats out a fellow criminal? What if the patient is a horse that’s been put out to stud and it requests medication to cool its ardour? Are you, as a veterinarian, going to keep mum and keep all those conversations confidential?”
Of course, it is entirely possible that the vet in question was really referring to “doctor-patient’s owner” confidentiality, but even that one sounds a little fishy. Personally, I think the dog doc should have just faced the question head on, and not attempted to muzzle the discussion.
So did you hear the one about the horse that walked into a bar and was asked by the bartender, “Why the long face?”
Lorne Eckersley is the publisher of the Creston Valley Advance.