2 puppies; no money; possible broken leg

Call just now from a relation of someone who's bought two very young puppies and now suspects that one of them has a broken leg as the pup is crying and unwilling to put any weight on it. The actual owner of the pups is on benefits and doesn't even have enough funds for credit on a mobile phone to call me direct.

Dogs are very much more liable than cats to injure themselves by jumping on or off household furniture and unfortunately this kind of thing is a fairly common occurrence. I'm hoping that the leg is simply twisted or bruised and simple pain relief and rest will sort it out. If it really is broken then some kind of operation will almost certainly be needed, although the pup's age is in his favour since growing bones repair themselves much more easily than adult ones.

We may well end up taking in one or both of the pups for rehoming if the owner isn't able to contribute anything towards the cost of treatment because it just isn't fair for us to provide free treatment for owners who haven't made any effort to plan at all, but charge the responsible ones who register their animals and save up to cover the cost of treatment.

Update 10 pm

The owner still hasn't managed to get the puppy to the emergency vet because they don't have any transport or money for a taxi. The puppy seems to be resting reasonably comfortably although he's distressed when he tries to walk. The owner's going to keep trying to locate someone who may be willing to give them a lift.

Update 18th November

Puppy has been seen by a vet and has a probable hairline fracture. He's been prescribed pain relief and cage rest (to give the injury a chance to heal). Owner will have to take him to the RSPCA clinic on Tuesday for a follow-up examination, but fortunately it doesn't look as though a repair operation's going to be needed.

Cystitis!

Harry doesn't have cystitis: he's just looking for a home 

Feline cystitis, or to give it its more correct name: Feline lower urinary tract disease (FLUTD) is frightening to owners because any unexplained bleeding is scary. 

It can ultimately be a killer in male cats because there is a risk that it will cause what's known as a blocked bladder — when the cat cannot pass urine at all and strains so much that he may rupture his bladder or build up urinary toxins to a point which causes death.

In female cats urinary tract disease is less of an emergency but it should still be treated by a vet as soon as possible. 

In both sexes, low-level disease may cause the cat apparently to lose house-training (because he or she comes to associate the litter box with the pain of unproductive straining to pass urine) and cause the owner react harshly and so increase the stress which makes the condition worse. 

Today's early morning call from an owner whose female cat was passing small trickles of urine stained with blood was fairly non-worrying (although it would have been better all round if she'd kept up her registration so that she could have seen our out of hours vets today). As she wasn't acutely ill and being female was at low risk of blocking, she could reasonably be asked to wait until our normal clinic session on Tuesday morning. 

If she'd been a male with a blockage the story might have been much less happy. Surgical un-blocking can cost up to £600 at a private vet and by the time an owner realises there is a problem a male cat can be in terrible pain, to the point that waiting until our next clinic session would be inhumane.

Heart disease to round off a stressful weekend

This caller's cat had been missing for several days and returned on Saturday evening, apparently distressed and panting with her mouth open. She had been to the local private vet in the past, but her owners had no idea that they would be closed over the weekend and that the out of hours cover would cost £100 just for the consultation fee. 

They decided to wait until Monday when their normal vet would be available, but by mid-afternoon on Sunday the cat was so visibly distressed that they called the branch helpline in desperation. 

I agreed that we would cover the consultation fee so she could have first aid today and they would bring the cat to our Tuesday clinic to register her (with a silent mental reservation on my part that she might not live until then).

Even responsible owners who get their pets vaccinated and chipped and provide routine vet care don't always recognise just how expensive it may be if an emergency happens at an inconvenient time or if a condition doesn't respond to initial treatment and requires several visits to the surgery.

Considering that the recent PDSA survey showed that a third of pet owners aged between 18 and 24 would give their pets up if the cost became too great there's a time bomb of unwanted animals in the making.

Myxomatosis

Had a call to our helpline yesterday which left me feeling exasperated and upset in more or less equal measure. The person concerned clearly did love animals but also had some issues which meant she wasn't really capable of looking after them properly. She'd "rescued" three rabbits from someone else who'd been threatening to kill them by wringing their necks, but couldn't afford the cost of vaccination at her local vet and didn't have transport to get them to our clinic from the remote village where she lived.One rabbit had already had to be put to sleep because he had myxomatosis and now a second was showing the same symptoms but the vet wouldn't see her because the owner hadn't yet paid off the debt for treating the first one. 

In any case, because it was Saturday afternoon, the surgery she could reach on foot was closed and being covered from their other one in Cambridge which would have cost her £100 for an out of hours consultation and in any case wasn't accessible because she had no transport and no money for a taxi.

Our fantastic inspector offered to go out to the rabbit as she clearly needed to be put to sleep to end her suffering but the owner called back about twenty minutes later to say the bunny had died.

I've offered to cover the cost of getting the surviving rabbit vaccinated at the private vet, which is trying to close the stable door after the horse has bolted but will give him a chance if he's not already incubating the disease.

We can't offer to pay off her existing debt, both because we can't afford it and because it would risk opening the floodgates to everyone who hasn't budgeted for their pets becoming sick.

The problem of vet treatment costs isn't straightforward. The only way we could provide anything like an NHS for animals would be if virtually every animal lover in England and Wales joined us and helped raise funds to do it. We can't simply wash our hands of it and say it's the owner's responsibility and that's it because there are too many people with animal who really are not capable of making the hard decisions needed to ensure they only have the pets they can afford to care for properly. On top of that there are the good owners who lose their jobs, have accidents themselves or take on uninsurable animals with existing medical problems.

Transport!

Writing this at 4.30 am having had an emergency call to the branch helpline just after 4 so no point trying to get back to sleep as I've got to be up by 6 anyway.

Our clinic has out of hours emergency cover for animals who have been registered by attending a normal clinic session, meaning pets whose owners couldn't pay the £100+ unsocial hours fees which a private vet would charge have access to low-cost treatment instead of having to take their chances until morning.

What we can't do is provide transport; I can't really wake up one of our volunteer drivers at this time of night and it costs around £100 to call out the commercial animal ambulance. RSPCA inspectors are not there to provide a taxi service and in any case there simply aren't enough of them on duty at night for it to be practical to divert one of them away from other emergency calls because some pet owner has no arrangements for transporting their pets.

The 4 am call was regarding a large dog whose owner was doubtful whether she could get him into a car and is the third this month where the main issue for getting the animal treated was transport to the vet.

At reasonable times of day we can sometimes arrange for one of our volunteers to help but there really are limitations on what's possible.

Cambridge Evening News have kindly given some publicity to our survey about access to veterinary treatment and it's looking as though transport is a fairly major issue in stopping animals getting timely care.

Click here to take the survey

Rabbit Awareness Week 2012

Take a look at this video for more information about keeping pet rabbits happy.

Our clinic in Cambridge offers low-cost rabbit vaccination (£17) to owners who receive means-tested state benefits (including working tax credits). This will provide a year's protection against myxomatosis and Viral Hemorrhagic disease. By taking your rabbit to our clinic you will also be registering them, which has the additional benefit of giving them access to our out of hours emergency service which is restricted to registered pets.

Click the tab above for more information about the clinic.

If you've not visited this page before, we'd be grateful if you could complete our survey into veterinary treatment costs as this will help us improve the services we provide locally.

 

Survey: please help

We're trying to develop a better picture of the unmet needs for veterinary treatment in the area served by our animal clinic and beyond.
Please encourage anyone you know who has pets to complete it: all information is anonymous, but will help us to find what we need to do to reduce the numbers of animals who go without the treatment they need.

RSPCA Week: It's all about money...

And, yes, I'm afraid that it is all about money. 

Without funds to pay for veterinary treatment, pet food, boarding of animals we can't place in domestic foster homes, suitable animal housing, petrol costs for volunteers who move animals or pre-visit adopters, we can't help any animals.

We understand that most people are keen to do hands-on volunteering to benefit animals, but, without the financial wherewithal to cover materials and the things that volunteers can't do, there can't be any hands-on work.

Whatever your role in the branch, please look at your diary and work out a way to put in at least 2 hours helping with this year's RSPCA week collection. 

RSPCA week runs from 30th April to 6th May and we have permission to collect outside all the Tesco Superstores in our area (Ely, Newmarket, Royston, Cambridge, Fulbourn, Bar Hill and Milton). Rowena, our new volunteer organiser is working out a rota to cover as much of the available time as possible, so PLEASE email her at volunteering@rspca-cambridge.org.uk to let her know that you will do your bit.

Thank you!

Veterinary treatment again

Maddeningly it appears that people are still not paying attention to our plea that they get their animals registered at our clinic so that they will be eligible for low cost treatment outside normal clinic hours in an emergency. Combine this with the fact that others are still allowing animals to breed without considering what will happen if something goes wrong, and yet another group are buying young animals, and you have a nightmare situation.

To give some idea of what this means: on Monday we had a frantic call from someone whose new puppy was now vomiting repeatedly and becoming unresponsive. Nearly all her spare cash seems to have been spent buying the puppy and she had no idea that intravenous fluids at a private vet would cost around £200. On Sunday night we had a call from someone with a litter of kittens who'd accidentally knocked over a video-player on one of their siblings. Last Thursday evening someone who did know about the clinic called us as an emergency because his dog was very ill but he hadn't taken him to the normal clinic session because he didn't have any money. The previous week we had another instance of a person with a  giant dog so ill that she could not stand simply demanding that we should pay to get a vet out to her because she couldn't be got to the vet.

If we don't help, animals like these will go without any treatment, and it's not their fault their owners are so thoughtless.

If we do help, it risks simply perpetuating the problem of people with not enough to do acquiring animals they can't afford.

There's a separate problem that's almost a mirror-image of it. When we rehome animals, we do careful checks of the suitability of the home. In fact it's comparatively rare for us to turn homes down; it's more about trying to steer people towards suitable animals. However we do sometimes tell people they simply don't have suitable facilities and/or arrangements for what they'd do if the animal was ill or injured, and it's highly probable that some of those we refuse do go out and buy instead. When they do, we may well end up providing veterinary treatment for the purchased animal or, indeed, end up rehoming the animal if the purchasers really cannot cope.

In many ways, what we ought to be doing is trying to draw in more of the people who desperately want animal companionship, but don't have enough money or skills and involve them in working to provide a comprehensive support service.

Update
Sadly the puppy died two days later.

Welfare assistance

The Wirral News reports that RSPCA Wirral and Chester branch is having to cut staff at its animal centre.

"THE RSPCA’s Animal Centre in Wallasey is making further cuts and asking staff to volunteer for redundancy as its financial struggles continue. 

Last November the charity’s Wirral and Chester branch closed its clinic in Birkenhead – which was running at a loss of £20,000 a year – after trustees decided to focus resources on its centre in Cross Lane. At the time the branch, which has been in existence for around 120 years, was said to have just a year’s worth of running costs in reserve. 

Now trustees have decided their only option is to reduce staffing costs and an animal welfare assistance scheme. From this week the scheme, which gives treatment for pets owned by people on low incomes, will be replaced by an emergency vet consultation. ... read more..."

Clearly the "newsworthy" aspect of this is the possible closing of the animal shelter and the effect on the branch welfare assistance scheme is glossed over in a way that suggests the reporter didn't understand that the branch previously offered help with the cost of treatment for pets of low income owners and now can only cover the cost of a consultation (meaning the owner must find the whole cost of the actual treatment). 

In many parts of the country RSPCA branches are the ONLY source of help available to people who can't afford to pay a private vet. In Cambridgeshire, our animal clinic is the only low-cost veterinary treatment centre for an area of 125 square miles, but in most cases a branch will support access to treatment by providing financial help for owners to use private vets. This is much more low-profile than having a facility of your own and something that's harder to publicise and fundraise for when times are tough.

Very few people allow their animals to starve—but I'm afraid quite large numbers of them simply do nothing about sick animals and justify it to themselves by saying they're not neglectful because they would take their animal to a vet if there was one whose charges they could afford.

Why use volunteers?

This might seem entirely obvious — we use volunteers to make more money available to help animals — but it's currently a hot topic in general volunteering circles, with some people saying that it's better to cut services than to replace staff with volunteers, and others rather more sensibly arguing that half a loaf is better than no bread and it's preferable to keep a few staff supported by volunteer helpers than making everyone redundant.

From the standpoint of an animal charity I have to admit I find the repeated assertions that volunteers should never, never be seen as "free labour" a bit strange. Volunteers are donating their time and it makes no sense to insist on devising complicated explanations of why this isn't the really important bit of volunteering.

If you're a stray cat with a broken leg, you need a qualified, paid vet to fix it, but you need volunteers to raise the cash that pays the vet.

If you happen to be a merchant banker, it probably would be more useful to us if you bunged us the odd half-million rather than helping out in your leisure time, but, for most of us, volunteering is a way to give the charity a cash equivalent we couldn't afford to donate as actual money from our wages.

Our shops illustrate how this works: we need some paid staff to ensure we can open regularly at the times customers expect, but if all the work involved in running a shop had to be done by paid staff the profit available to use for animals would be minimal, if not non-existant — probably around the 5% received by charities who don't have shops, but get a percentage from commercial "charity bag" collections.

Fundamentally, money is a way of storing the value of work. Whether you do the work directly or donate it as cash, cat food or saleable items, we need your help.

Please visit our shops at 61 Burleigh Street, Cambridge, 10a Market Street, Newmarket, or 188 Mill Road, Cambridge and give us your support.

Veterinary treatment again

We have to get our fundraising up to a level where we can give more help to owners who honestly can't afford the cost of treatment. Unless we can get on top of this, our rehoming effort is almost pointless, while animals who do have homes are dying because there's no way we can provide enough help to save their lives.

Every day our phone line gets desperate, crying owners that we can't help because they are way outside our area or who need far more help with the cost than we can possibly give.

We can't insist these animals are signed over to us, because that would still leave us with huge treatment costs we can't afford to cover. Some of the owners who come asking for help could raise the money if they really tried, but most of them simply don't have it and have no way to borrow because their income's so low they're not good credit risks. The same people are least likely to be able to afford pet insurance, or to have organised pre-registration with the PDSA or with our own clinic.

We can do our best to educate people about the importance of finding out what they need to do to be prepared for emergencies, but there will always be those who don't realise until too late. Unfortunately, the people with least money are likely to be those who are least able to cope with the complications of registering for charity help before their animal is desperately ill and needs immediate help.

Our shops are the best way we have to raise our income. They're already generating funds that cover all their fixed costs, plus the profit which we can use for our welfare work. This means that every extra hour spent volunteering in one of the shops generates money that can all be used to help more animals, because there are no additional running costs (other than the odd cup of tea).

Just managing decline...

Bobby needs a home

Is not something we should ever accept.

Currently we are stuck in a series of vicious cycles and unless we can break out and convert them into virtuous cycles things are just going to get worse.

For years RSPCA branches have struggled against a perception that they have almost unlimited resources and are simply being mean when they can't do everything.

We've gone on throwing everything we have into efforts to improve in the hope that finally enough of the animal-loving public will understand we are doing all we can and be won over into giving their support.

Every time we can't do enough someone will go away to tell all their friends that "The RSPCA doesn't care," and, in the next turn of the vicious cycle,  our resources are even more limited.

Unless we can turn this round we'll end up in a situation where injured strays are kept alive just long enough to give an owner some chance of locating them and otherwise put to sleep because no-one can afford the cost of treatment. Understandably, vets hate it when this happens and it's probably one of the biggest reasons why so few vets and vet nurses are RSPCA members. 

Ultimately, the solution is in their hands. If animal welfare professionals want a different RSPCA it's up to them to join and participate. 

We can't offer free treatment to every local pet owner who is on a very low income, but we can give them the option of taking responsibility and registering at our clinic so that they can access low-cost treatment in an emergency.

However hard they work 60-odd volunteers and 200 subscribers have no possible way of satisfying the amount of need that exists. Four thousand people all contributing what they can do to help could bring about a situation where all treatable strays could be saved and found new homes and all pet owners in genuine need could be given access to affordable veterinary treatment.

In some ways the deteriorating animal welfare situation mirrors attitudes behind the rioting in London. People being told there's no point in using democratic options to make their views known because everything's corrupt. Being told nothing they personally can do will help them improve their community. Thinking they're entitled to more and being aggrieved when they don't get it. Believing there's no need to take personal responsibility for anything because someone else will always have to sort things out. Destroying instead of building.

The only way to get anything worthwhile done is to cooperate. None of us can expect to get precisely what we want, but working together gives us a heck of a better chance of getting close. 

Running on empty

Just had a call from the 24 hour vet about an owner with absolutely no money and a pregnant cat who needs a caesarian. There's no way we can cover the cost, and he's going to try the Cats Protection branch, but even if they can help this time, eventually they'll run out of money as well.

Private veterinary surgeries can't work for nothing or they will go our of business. If only the owner had got her cat spayed—CP would have given her a voucher to get it done for nothing, or she could have used our clinic and paid only £35. If she'd done no more than arrange for her cat to be vaccinated at our clinic it would have meant the cat was registered and eligible for emergency treatment at the University Vet School's reduced charity rates.

The small numbers of people who keep animal charities running can't solve these problems on their own. We need support from the competent animal lovers who form the majority of the pet-owning population, and we need to educate the minority to develop at least the minimal forethought to get pets vaccinated and registered with our own clinic or with the PDSA if they're not going to be able to afford a private vet.

Help with veterinary treatment

After spending all morning on reception at our clinic, I was less than delighted to see someone from London had posted a complaint on the branch Facebook page about the level of service the RSPCA provides to pet owners who can't afford to pay out of hours fees at a private vet.

Unfortunately this is just one aspect of a vicious circle in which we can't raise enough funds to do everything members of the public think we should, which leads to bad publicity and in turn to less funds and more situations where we can't help.

We run the only low-cost animal clinic in the whole of Cambridgeshire, and if we go under something like 2% of the local population will have no source of affordable veterinary help at all. It's absolutely imperative that we persuade more people who care about animals that the RSPCA can't function unless they get involved and help keep our services running.

Part of the problem is that we are dealing with a lot of people who are having difficulty finding relatively small amounts of money. On the whole, someone facing a £2,000 veterinary bill will understand that it's not possible for the RSPCA to cover it. Someone whose animal needs £100 worth of treatment can't understand why an organisation with a £250,000 turnover can't pay for it all, and, indeed, if there was just one person in that situation there would be no problem.

What is completely impossible is finding that hundred pounds every day of the week in addition to carrying on the normal clinic service for registered patients.

It's not as straightforward as saying that people shouldn't have pets unless they are prepared to pay for them, because at the point where they need a vet it's not a choice of keeping the pet or having it rehomed, but keeping it or having it put to sleep. Plus, of course, if everyone who would struggle to pay a £100 vet bill asked us to rehome their pet immediately, we couldn't possibly do that either.

Another antifreeze poison case

Vets have just phoned to let me know the cat who was admitted with suspected poisoning last night has been put to sleep as tests showed that his kidneys had stopped functioning.  He was only three years old, and the only consolation is that at least we were able to prevent him dying slowly and in pain.

His owner paid £10 (all the cash she had). I hope that she will pay us back for the rest of the cost of emergency treatment, but obviously it's human nature that there's less incentive when the outcome is a dead pet rather than a live one. 

What to do?

Ultimately the only solution is to mobilise the local pet-owning community to understand we can't keep providing services unless everyone helps by doing something, even if they can't do very much.

Rollercoaster week

After the high of our dog show, I got home to find Bambi hiding under my bed and obviously not well. Taxi to the 24 hour vet and she was put on a drip to support her liver, but sadly further tests and a scan showed that she'd finally gone into liver failure, 3 years after I adopted her, having been signed over to the branch by her previous owners, who couldn't cope with her medical condition.

Fifteen years isn't bad for a cat who developed a chronic condition at twelve, but I'm torn between relief that she had good quality of life right up to the last few days and sadness that it all happened so suddenly. Cycled over to the vet after working in the shop last Sunday and she's now buried in my garden.

As we approach the holidays, schools and youth groups start to think about end of term activities, and it's excellent that the St Matthews school Brownie pack and Barton Primary school were both kind enough to organise fundraising events to support us. Let's hope the children who got involved will be the RSPCA volunteers and trustees of the future.

Saturday was horribly wet, but today we had one of the best Sundays at the Burleigh St. shop for a long time, taking over £250. Very many thanks to all the people who donated so many really attractive items. 

The desperate need to keep funds coming in was made all too clear too, as I had two calls for help with the consultation fee for very sick animals. If we hadn't been here neither of them would have been seen by a vet today. 

This always involves very difficult decisions when we're called outside normal consulting hours, and the animal isn't registered with our clinic, as it's so expensive just to be seen and any help we give would go much further if it could wait until morning. Vets can't always tell whether something really is serious by asking the owner over the phone. 

Occasionally their judgement can be hopelessly wrong, as happened to me some years ago when a vet assured me the owner was just making a fuss, but in fact the cat didn't survive the night. I felt dreadful, and of course the owner blamed the RSPCA for the cat's death.

Desperately worrying

Vets' charges seem to be going through the roof. We've just been quoted £400 for an x-ray on one of our rescue dogs to confirm that her broken leg is now healed. We may be able to get some reduction by shopping around, given that there's no desperate urgency to have it done immediately as it's simply confirmation she can stop being kept on restricted exercise. However it's a desperately worrying trend as it must indicate that an owner with no pet insurance is facing a £2k bill if their dog breaks a leg, which must mean that, for many dogs, a broken bone is now a death sentence.

Anyone who reads Cambridge Evening News will have seen the excellent write up they gave for our clinic's 75th anniversary. I originally wanted my quote about the situation of our clinic to say that around 4,000 animals are at risk of being put to sleep by their owners if we can't raise the money to stay open, but was advised to change that to say they were at risk of needing to be rehomed to avoid the possibility that, "RSPCA says 4,000 pets will be put down" would become the story. I'm not totally sure I was right to agree, because I think there's danger in trying to minimise the real situation, so as to put over a positive story, because it means no-one takes us seriously until we actually do fall off the cliff. 

Ultimately it's not physically possible for 43 volunteer workers to raise enough money to fund a service for over 3,000 people and we're very close to the point where we either succeed in recruiting more help or everything simply falls apart.

Update
I see from their Facebook page that the PDSA are evidently in difficulties too as they appear to be having to be more restrictive about the conditions to access treatment at their clinics.

Adding up the costs

Some days I really worry that I am channeling the Reverend Arthur Broome, famous as the original founder of the RSPCA — but also for being thrown into the debtors' prison when he couldn't raise enough cash to cover the Society's outgoings.

Everyone seems to feel entitled to something from us, and it is rapidly getting to a point where things are completely top-heavy, with the number of people who think we should be doing, or paying for, something hugely more than those who want to help our work.

Part of the problem is that there is no useful feedback to animal owners to impress on them that they must do some planning about what they'd do if their pet was ill or injured. So many have no idea it may cost £100 just to have their animal seen—not treated—by a vet, on a Sunday or bank holiday. At that point tears and pleading won't do any good; lots of them genuinely don't have the ability to lay their hands on that amount of money at short notice.

If I'm unlucky and we get five of them in a day, then it's £500 spent that we can't afford—and most probably the animals will be put to sleep because actual treatment would have meant another £200-£600 that the owner doesn't have. Those five individual owners may have learned a terrible lesson (or they may simply go away thinking their pet died because we didn't care enough to pay the whole amount for treatment), but it doesn't have any impact on all the other people out there with pets and little or no money. 

So it's going to keep on happening again, and again, and again so far as I can see unless we can get on top of a system that gets treatment for the animal but does enforce some payback from the owner. Sadly hardly any vets will allow payment by instalments now, because people don't pay, so the animal charities are the only available solution.

It's no good saying it's the owners' responsibility to have enough money; or to take out insurance; or that they could have saved enough by cutting out holidays, because what matters is having the money available on the day, which most of them don't, and it's the animals who pay the ultimate price. 

Looking back over the past few months I am wondering whether the figures for euthanasia of unwanted animals are an almost pointless statistic because far greater numbers of treatable animals are being put to sleep through lack of funds, or, worst of all, dying in pain because they never even reached a vet. I'm almost certain that some owners ring up a surgery; are told the charge is £100 and just give up and wait for the animal to get better or die.

Sadly, I think being told their pet is going to be killed because they can't produce the money for treatment is the first experience many people have of facing up to responsibility that no-one else is going to sort out for them. All their lives they're being told they can't be expected to deal with things because they're disadvantaged, then suddenly they're slammed against the reality that their animal depended on them and no-one else is going to help—except us, and we simply can't raise enough money to do it.

Why we help some owners with their vet bills II

Reasonably-enough, many of our potential supporters don't see why they should give their hard-earned cash to pay other people's vet bills, and this is often hotly debated on the National Society's facebook page.

We've just had a case that perfectly illustrates why we struggle with the ethics of this:

One of our clinic users contacted our emergency phoneline because her pup had suddenly begun coughing up blood. She was a responsible owner who had paid for vaccinations and did have the money to cover the emergency consultation fee, but she didn't have enough money to pay for tests to establish exactly what was going on; even at our subsidised rates.

Worst case scenario would have been a blood-clotting disorder, which would be hopeless and untreatable. Best case would be some kind of infection, which could be relatively cheap to treat. 

BUT without knowing what kind of infection (and whether it actually was something infectious) treatment wouldn't have been possible. 

It would unfortunately have been perfectly reasonable for the vet to advise euthanasia on the grounds that there was a 50/50 chance that it was an untreatable condition and any money spent on tests would be wasted.

We agreed that we'd cover the cost of the tests (and then of treatment if the underlying cause was a simple infection), and today the results are back and show that the pup has lungworm. This is potentially fatal if the lungs are badly damaged, but there is a reasonable chance of successful treatment with relatively cheap wormers.

In this instance the owner probably won't be able to pay any of the cost back and will therefore decide to sign the pup over for rehoming. We have to insist on some kind of penalty if the owner can't pay anything because otherwise everyone would say they couldn't afford to pay and we would go bust and close.

But we don't want animals to pay with their lives because their owners can't find money at short notice.

A hundred pounds is an enormous amount of money to someone who is on income support, and frankly it doesn't help all that much to know that the cost would have been more like three hundred pounds at a private vet. 

If owners put off basic things like chipping, vaccination and neutering because they're short of cash it may cost us in the long run in terms of strays who can't be returned, animals with preventable diseases and unwanted litters who need to be rehomed.