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3 Ways To Make Vet Visits Less Scary For Your Pet

3 Ways To Make Vet Visits Less Scary For Your Pet

The vet can be a scary experience for pets. To them, it is a big, brightly lit room that smells weird where strange humans are touching them, putting them through vaccinations, tableting, and any number of other confusing procedures. Plus, they usually only come when they are sick in pain, or to undergo medical procedures so they naturally associate those feelings with this place.

 I’m not gunna lie if I was a dog or a cat, I’d be a complete A@#% at the vets. I don’t like being man-handled by strangers and bossed around without consent.

 Here's my top tips for supporting your pet to have a more stress-free and co-operative experience at the vet. P.S this means you need to be their advocate and education veterinary professionals on your pet, how they see and cope in the world and make sure it’s respected!

1.     Teach co-operative care

Co-operative care places your pet front and centre of their vet visit. This means we don’t push the animal into submission or aggression. That’s called being an ass! It means asking owners what the animals likes, doesn’t like, can and can’t cope with and how they like or are used to being handled and forming a plan to perform the procedure or test around this.

 This is also something that can be taught by owners when you become the caregiver of a pet. In my honest opinion, I couldn’t give a stuff if you dog can sit, beg, roll over or walk at heel. These are human control and shiny commands that really don’t correlate to the needs of dogs and cats. Teach your dog to like and be ok with blood draws, needles, wearing a bandage, wearing a muzzle, having their nails cut and coat washed and groomed without the need for restraint. 

 Co-operative care utilise the positive reinforcement method of ‘shaping’ to allow your dog/cat to be the active participant in the activity/procedure you are teaching them. This means you don’t even have to talk to them while you teach them. In fact, the less talking the better. In shaping, we need to understand every step involved in the procedure you want to teach. For example, a nail clip involves the dog laying down comfortably on their side (if that’s comfortable for that dog), you touching their paw and nail, the clippers coming into view, the clipper wrapping around their nail, the clippers creature pressure around the nail, the clippers cutting the nail, then this being repeated for a duration. You then need to teach each step at a pace that’s right for your pet. We wait and observe the animal to offer the behaviour we are looking for and then reward, gradually building in each new step over a period of training sessions.

 Do it right and we have a pet that is happy to participate and have these procedure done for life without stress and man-handling.

 2.     Find a trained fear/force free vet practice

We recommend finding clinics or individually training vets and nurses that have fear-free handling training. This means they will work with the animal in a co-operative and low stress way. Beware however, lots of people claim this but aren’t trained.

3.     Don’t pass the buck!

 While you can hire a trainer to work on this, we highly recommend that you as their owner do this. You have the relationship, you will be at the vet with them and above all this kind of training further builds your trust, bond and relationship with your animal. Who wouldn’t want that!

 If you’re not sure where to go you can join Dr. Roz’s 6 week online co-operative care training course and start your journey to happier vet visits today.