@snowberry I was stupid to think it was common practice for a place to care.
I’m sure if you offered to pay the hourly wage for someone to stay, they’d arrange it. Of course, in order to provide quality care for the pet, you’d need to pay for a technician, rather than a receptionist or a kennel tech. And, of course, since a tech can’t legally practice medicine except under direct supervision of a licensed veterinarian, you’d need to pay for a doctor to be there overnight, too. And they’d need to have the lights on and the monitoring equipment on, so there’s the cost of running the hospital. Or – here’s a thought! If you want 24 hour care, use a facility designed to function 24 hours a day.
As far as profit margin, I will now climb on my soapbox. A veterinarian spends 4 years in undergrad and then 4 years in vet school. The average vet student graduates with $174,000 in student loans (veterinary specialists stay in training for an additional 2–5 years and may graduate with over $400,000 in debt). The average starting vet salary is around $70,000. Hospitals use the exact same surgery tables, surgery instruments, anesthetic ventilators, surgical instruments, blood chemistry machines, drugs, etc, etc, etc – and they pay the same cost. But your veterinarian charges you a fraction of what human medicine costs. Consider a spay surgery – an ovariohysterectomy. You will typically pay anywhere from $250 to $500. Now compare that to a woman obtaining a hysterectomy – $11,739.00. So until you work in veterinary medicine and see the dedication, hard work, health risks, and tears that are involved, ease off on the judgmental statements about those who care for pets for the love of animals – we’re certainly not in it for the money.