Bridgend hamster owner quoted £500 to have its teeth removed

by Kagedeah

6 comments
  1. I know nothing about hamsters, but I did recently have to pay for a dental procedure for my cat which was far from cheap. When I looked into this I found out that most animals require general anaesthetic for dental procedures. The staff time taken to manage anasethic and recovery safely, plus the facilities this requires, and the insurance the practice needs to do all of this add up very quickly. 

  2. I am a vet. This is totally normal.
    It’s not any more or less than a dog/cat would be.
    The tradeoff being thet although it takes less drugs, it takes more equipment and more specialist knowledge.

    No news here.

    People really need to know how much healthcare costs, our NHS has us spoiled.

  3. I cant be the only one that thinks the owner sounds a bit like an entitled idiot here?

    “Id expect that much for a dog or a cat,  but a hamster? That’s ridiculous” no actually I’d expect it to cost a hell of a lot more!

    Its skull is tiny and fragile, its brain and eyes are millimetres away from where you are trying to do dental work and depending on which teeth they are working on they are either massive and have really long roots that run up into the animals face or are tiny and would require extreme precision to remove without damaging any of the animals other teeth or jaw.

    your asking you vet to do high risk precision micro dental surgery on a notoriously fragile patient animal (seriously hamster bones may as well be made out of paper with how easily they can get hurt) and an operation that is likely done extremely rarely and requires really specialist skills on top of all of the other specialist skills a vet has to train for.

    All that in mind £500 sounds a bargain to me. And you have the temerity to call the vets greedy? Fuck it costs £100 to just have have my human professionally cleaned when you get a bit of scale build-up. If you give a shit about your animals you’d just have them insured and if you couldn’t afford their insurance or one of vet bills you wouldn’t get them anyway. Paying vet bills comes with the whole responsibly owning a pet deal you signed up for.

  4. I once paid £600 in Tokyo to have my hamster’s leg amputated when it was injured.

    It’s not cheap.

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