Thursday, June 16, 2011

Finding a vet for your small pet

I recently did a post about giving small pets regular health checks to look for any signs of injury or illness. Which brings up the topic of actually finding a vet, because doing the health checks isn't going to do you any good unless there is a vet you can go to.


So first of all, in areas like mine, finding a veterinary practice for small pets like rabbits, ferrets, guinea pigs, chinchillas, gerbils, hamsters, rats, mice, etc. is very difficult. When I got Munchkin my rabbit, I did a lot of searching around via the internet, and finally found one vet that treats small animals. 


There generally aren't a lot of small pet veterinary hospitals around (at least where I live). Also not all of them do ALL small pets. They may only do rabbits or something like that. Or, they might not do surgeries. Or, as in my instance, there is only one vet that does small animals at the practice. 


So here are some ways to find them:


search online
ask at local shelters and rescues. 
ask at pet stores
you can even ask at vets that only do dogs and cats if they know of any small animal vets
you can also ask at a breeder that breeds small animals 




And if there really are no small animal vets around, you can either make a very very long trip, which would not be useful in an emergency, or you could find some small animal rescues. 


Generally if there is a guinea pig rescue, they will have a guinea pig savvy vet, or a rabbit rescue will have a rabbit savvy vet, or a ferret rescue etc. You can also look for any shelters or rescues that spay/neuter all rabbits that they get, which means that they obviously have a vet experienced with rabbits, and probably other small animals. You can probably get help from any of these vets. Even if a shelter does not spay/neuter any small pets, they still could have vets that can help with minor things, just not surgeries. 



2 comments:

  1. Never thought about this beyond cats and dogs and rabbits. Interesting.

    I also thought all small animal vets would treat any small animal. I know there are some who specialize in large animals like cows, horses, sheep, etc., but didn't think it was more complicated than that. Guess it's just like us with all of our specialists.

    -Animal Gram

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  2. Very interesting post! I shared this to my mother because she wants to find a new vet for her pet. I think this blog is the perfect guide for her. I will now show this to her.

    Vets Somerset

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