What If your Dog Had an Emergency?
In this time of living from paycheck-to-paycheck, with many people on the brink of foreclosure, what do people do when their pet has an emergency? Working as an emergency veterinarian for a number of years, I have seen a significant increase in people who simply cannot afford to pay for emergency care for their pets. At the very least, they find it extremely difficult to find ready money to put down for the kind of deposits that the typical veterinary emergency hospital requires in order to begin treatment. Lack of sufficient funds can leave an owner faced with euthanasia for a beloved companion. The goal of Veterinary Emergency Funding Mission (VEFM) is to help locate these funds.
VEFM helps in four important ways:
(1) finding resources for immediate, short-term emergency care;
(2) teaching participants ways to avoid emergencies with their pets in the future;
(3) counseling participants in money management, so they will have resources of their own if emergencies do arise; and
(4) once the current emergency is past, reaching out and help others in similar situations. In other words, they will not get a free hand-out. Instead, they will get a gift that requires making a commitment to others: “a gift that is given again.” (See http://www.heifer.org for information on this principle.)
To find out more information, go to our blog at http://vefm.blogspot.com .
Tell Us your Story
We want to hear your story. No pet should be denied emergency care because an owner has fallen on hard times. Let us hear from you, to help kick-start the birth of the Veterinary Emergency Funding Mission, or VEFM. Help us meet our target start-up date of January 1, 2009. To tell your story, go to: http://vefm.blogspot.com/2008/09/we-want-to-hear-your-story.html
