A few weeks ago a Santa Fe woman called us about Spook --
her 8-year old male cat. He just wasn’t
acting right and she wanted to get him to a vet to find out why. But raising two grandchildren on an income of
only $15,000 per year made that next to impossible. The first clinic she called quoted $150 just
to walk in the door and then more depending on what treatments he needed. The second clinic quoted less but they
couldn’t see him until the next day. I
could tell by the somberness in her voice that she felt he needed attention
sooner rather than later. She hesitated
to call a third clinic because by now she knew the cost of diagnosing and
treating Spook at any clinic was way outside her budget. Then a friend of hers suggested calling us
for financial assistance.
Normally we would have declined to help because our focus has
been exclusively on cat sterilization. But
something about this call hit a chord.
And -- if our goal in sterilizing lower-income pet cats is to keep them
in their original homes – would it be stretching it too much if we added acute
medical emergencies to our program?
After all – if a cat’s guardian can’t afford to sterilize their cat, how
are they going to pay for a medical emergency?
And – without prompt professional attention– the cat may suffer
unnecessarily – or may even die prematurely.
Considering this we suggested Spook’s guardian take him to a third
clinic and ask the vet to provide us with a diagnosis and estimate of treatment
costs. If the long-range prognosis for
the cat was good, we may be able to pay the costs to treat his emergency.
Lucky for Spook she got him to a clinic that afternoon. His urinary tract was blocked and if that had
not been corrected immediately he may have died. Fortunately after a brief hospitalization with
lots of fluid therapy he was ready to go home again and pick up life where he
left off – with no serious damage to his health. Don’t you just love a happy ending?
We do. So now we’ve formulated
Spook’s situation into a new Foundation program called Acute Veterinary Care Assistance. Services covered are the necessary costs to
treat an otherwise-healthy cat for an acute and curable health problem. It serves as a last-resort option for cat
caregivers in our service area who are unable to pay for the treatments
themselves and cannot qualify for traditional funding through existing
financing programs such as Care Credit.
The best news is that it won’t take any funding from our
free cat spay/neuter program because we’re funding it with the money we
previously allocated for feline veterinary scholarships – a program we put on
hold during the 2009 financial meltdown. With our last scholarship recipient graduating
this year, it was time to open the program to new applicants or reallocate the
money to something else. As much as we
liked sponsoring new feline veterinarians, we believe funding acute veterinary care
is more in line with our mission –channeling the money directly to otherwise
healthy cats in need of emergency care.
For just as we believe that no cat should have to lose a
good home because their caregiver can’t afford to get them fixed, we also
believe no cat should have to suffer or die because their guardian can’t afford
to pay for urgent care. For complete
program information on this and all our programs, visit our web site, Zimmer-Foundation.org.
