Saturday Afternoon
So here I sit working on the magic box trying to put some plans together; have a few videos playing on one of my monitors for background – cat napping on the desk next to me … when a Black Sabbath concert clip starts playing. The “Gathered In Their Masses” concert if I took my notes correctly. Playing their 40 yo cuts … (pretty similar to the 1971 concert I went to).
Said cat gets up, sits on my keyboard, staring with rapt attention at Ozzy doing his thing on some of the bands earliest pieces – “Black Sabbath” off their first album in this case.
Hey! I’m trying to get work done here …
Cat doesn’t move.
OK – sit back and watch the clip with my cat.
The cut ended, the cat got up and resumed his nap on the desk next to me.
And now I’m distracted saving this incident for posterity making y’all read about it.
🙂
Now back to it …
We’re down to 2 cats now and our oldest, Tawny Autumn is 15 and has been doing poorly for the past month or so. She doesn’t want to eat and my wife has been doing heroic effort effort to get her to eat. Our frige is half full of every kind of cat stuff you can imagine.
I went in the house about 1pm and started to make a ham n cheese sando and when Tawny Autumn heard me come in she flew down the stairs. I started fixing my sando and TA started trying to attract my attention and I leaned down and gave her a small tidbit of ham. She got on that ham like steenk on a monkey and wanted more. My wife was standing there and was amazed that she was eating anything. So I gave her more, and more, and finally my wife said that was enough because she didn’t want TA to throw up.
I’ve been dogless since late Sept and I am still in deep grief. I might be compensating, or scavenging, by spending more time with our 2 cats. I wrote several things about cats over on Gerard’s site in the past.
Tawny Autumn when she was feeling better….. yeah, she’s a Tortie
The bond between a good pet owner and the pet runs very deep. I appreciate you saying that you care. Sometimes when our pets look at us, it is as if they are looking into our souls.
Your wife must know my wife.
For north of a decade, my wife has made our dog’s dog food. It’s her concoction of boiled chicken, kale (which IMO is the Devil’s weed), sweet potatoes, apples, and brown rice, all cooked until pretty soft. It takes her at least half a day, involving every big pot we own over the entire cooktop. Once its cooled down enough to handle, she runs load after load through the food processor and then we bag it up in to quart zip lock bags and then into the freezer. She was making that Farmer’s Dog dog food before they were. I coulda been married to a zillionaire.
Both our dog and cat are now basically on our hospice care. The dog, a chihuahua, has congestive heart failure. She might last another year. The cat has pancreatitus (sp?) and he’ll go first. The Lovely Mrs azlib has him on all kinds of homeopathic this-and-thats, and I can’t keep up with what he’s supposed to be getting or when. That he is alive at all is all her doing. The knucklehead cat has this thing for eating inappropriate items and at a very young age, he swallowed about 3 feet of yarn, which of course, was invisible to x-ray and he could not pass. Enter the vet surgeon, who opened him up stem to stern to find that he was bound up with the yarn. We got our cat back minus a couple’o grand.
The costs for vets these days are off the charts. That’s what happens if you don’t go to them for a spell I guess. Last Sept we spent $2200 on a vet for our Shannon and she died 8 days later and the vet couldn’t tell me why she died!
In the past 3 weeks we have spent over $1200 (different vet) for the cat and no one knows what the problem is. WTF is going on here???
Vet costs, and other things, has caused us to probably not get any more animals and that pains me horribly. We’re down to just 2 cats now and to most people that sounds about normal but we’re used to having 4 or more cats and 2 dogs. For me personally I am very dog lonely. Been going on 5 months since she died but I still “talk” to her everyday….
Right now I’m going to go into the house and fire me up a cuppa joe.
When I get up from my chair I’m going to say out loud, “LET’S ROLL GURL!”, and in thousands of days gone by Shannon would spring from her rack and start dancing about.
Ghostsniper, One of the thing my wife and I practice is getting our pets as few shots as possible. We have to get the rabies but we make sure it is thimerasol free.
Veterinary practices in the United States provided $12 billion worth of services in 2022 alone, a number projected to grow to more than $23 billion by 2030. Private equity saw a great opportunity.
The veterinary services industry now consists of regional and national chains, S-corps, and sole proprietorships (though far fewer than 10 years ago), which vary in size from a single practice to several thousand veterinary practices.
The industry is increasingly dominated by horizontally integrated veterinary chains, which offer a mix of services ranging from general to referral veterinary medicine and surgery. The industry is comprised of almost 50 incorporated national or regional chains that operate almost 11,000 veterinary practices in the United States in 2022. Many of these are owned by private equity groups.
Results… vets are corporate employees not independent professionals, they are responsible to meet corporate objectives re cost, productivity and general Key Performance Objectives that translate to higher prices to pet owners and a loss of that old timey personal relationship with pet and pet owner.
On top of that, pet insurance is very expensive.
The major player in the corporate market for veterinary services is Mars, Incorporated, which purchased VCA Animal Hospitals in 2017, adding to its already sizable portfolio of veterinary businesses that includes national brands such as Banfield Pet Hospitals (2007) and Blue Pearl Veterinary Partners (2015). The few highly dominant market players, such as Mars, Incorporated, and JAB Consumer Partners, are increasingly under investigation for limiting competition, which may lead to higher prices for and lower quality of veterinary services (Federal Trade Commission, 2017, 2022)
You got me.
I make 4 lbs. of sirloin roast with carrots, celery rutabaga, & mushrooms in the crock pot-eat some now. freeze some for later & mix it with kibbles for the dog.
Would your dog perchance be named King? heh
ok, DT. How about a pic of the kitty?
I wrote this and Gerard posted it.
2nd time around.
==================
Posted