When you think of animal abuse you probably think about the stuff that makes the news-hoarding cases where animals are living in poor conditions or left to starve, kittens tossed out on the side of the road in a bag, animals that have been beaten, burned, etc. And those things do happen, and they are more common that we would like to think about, but are they the most common form of abuse? Probably not, or they wouldn't make the news. Sort of like a plane crash will almost always be on the news, but a car crash probably won't be.
When I think of animal abuse, I think of a different kind, the car crash kind you might say. This is more of a "sub-clinical" abuse. It may not be obvious, it's not a crime, it's not reportable, and there isn't anything anyone can do about it. Every single day at work I see pets who are suffering from treatable conditions that owners choose to ignore because they don't think it's really a problem, don't want to believe it's a problem, or can't afford to deal with it. I see pets with painful dental disease-a progressive condition that just continues to get worse. They didn't address it when it was mild and less expensive and now the pet has bleeding gums and infected teeth that cause pain every day and costs even more to fix making is less likely that it will get addressed. I see pets with chronic skin and ear infections because the owners don't use regular flea prevention, don't come back for rechecks, don't keep up with medications or other treatments to manage the condition. I see pets who will never not have fleas. I see pets with obvious arthritis, extreme obesity, untreated dry eye, tumors that continue to grow until they are uncomfortably large or ulcerated or infected, ingrown or overgrown toe nails and more.
You can educate. You can explain that just because the dog is still eating and not crying doesn't mean they are in pain. You can talk about prevention. You can talk about consequences. And then you can mark everything they declined in the chart and watch them get a new puppy that will suffer the same fate. And the funny thing is that so many of these same people will tell you they "rescued" their pet and that it must have been "abused" by someone. And all you can do is shake you head and move on to the next room.
And this does not even account for the things like Parvo or heartworms that could have easily been prevented in the first place. There is a lot of responsibility to owning a pet and unfortunately very few requirements in most cases to obtain one, and even fewer consequences for failing to provide adequate care for one. This is a multifactorial problem and I don't have all the answers, but on a good day I get a win and the client finally believes me and schedules a dental or tries the medication and maybe learns to take better care of that next puppy after all.
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