What does it cost to desex my pet?

Many people are surprised that the price of desexing a pet can vary quite a lot between vets. After all, don’t they all give the same result?

While it’s true that your pet will end up desexed regardless of where you go, what is included in the “package” can greatly influence the speed of recovery for your pet, the safety of the procedure, and the chance of complications occurring.

For a start, it is important to realise that for almost all vet clinics, desexing is done as a discounted procedure. We do these procedures at a discount to make the procedure more affordable to the majority of pet owners.

So, where do the differences come from?

1. Firstly, vet clinics need to be financially viable. As much as we would love to be able to treat everything for free, if we don’t charge adequately for our services we can’t buy new equipment, staff our clinics, and keep helping animals. If a procedure is heavily discounted, prices may need to be raised elsewhere. You may find that a clinic’s pricing strategy is to offer cheap desexing but have higher charges on other services, such as the treatment of unwell animals. Other clinics may charge a bit more for desexing, but when an animal is unwell their prices may be lower.
2. The “optional extras” can change the price quite dramatically. For example, some clinics do not include pain relief in their standard desexing price. It can cost $40-$70 on top of the standard price to have pain killers to go home with. Some clinics also charge extra for intravenous fluids, heat pads, etc. When comparing prices, it is important to see what is included. A clinic which includes things like pain killers and fluids as standard may have a higher headline price, but when other clinics add these in as “optional extras”, you may find the price goes up considerably.
3. Provision of After Hours Services. When your pet is desexed, most clinics will send them home that afternoon. But what happens if you become worried about that pet overnight? Some clinics don’t provide an after-hours service, so if your pet becomes unwell following routine surgery you could end up paying hundreds or even thousands more at another clinic. It costs a clinic quite a lot to run an after hours service, but to have a vet available locally just in case is very important.
4. Experience and qualifications of staff. Of course, experienced and highly qualified staff cost more, but tends to shorten the surgery time and reduces the risk of complications.

So, how do we do things at the Bunbury and Eaton Vet Clinics?

We have seven important points when it comes to desexing your pet with us:

1. We give pain killers to every animal. We believe every animal undergoing desexing surgery needs good quality pain relief, so we include it in the price we give you. Remember that the pain from surgery lasts for more than 24 hours, so your pet will have some pain killers to take at home.
2. Every animal receives intravenous fluids during the surgery. With 85% of animals experiencing low blood pressure during surgery, intravenous fluids are important to help maintain blood pressure, making the surgery safer and the recovery faster. Most people are amazed how awake our patients are when leaving our clinic.
3. A fully qualified vet nurse will be monitoring the anaesthetic. Although we sometimes have trainee nurses, there is always a fully qualified nurse monitoring our anaesthetics.
4. We monitor blood pressure, oxygen levels, breath carbon dioxide levels and temperature throughout anaesthesia. This is critical to make the anaesthetic as safe as possible. It has been shown time and again that careful anaesthetic monitoring gives you the chance to correct small problems before they become big problems.
5. We use a warm air machine while the animal is under anaesthetic and use heat pads when the animal is recovering. Hypothermia is one of the biggest killers of animals under anaesthetic, as well as delaying wound healing and recovery. It is also for your pets comfort. Without adequate support, an animal’s body temperature drops during anaesthesia. Since purchasing our warm air blanket, we have consistently found animals have a smoother and faster recovery from anaesthesia.
6. We provide a collar to stop the pet being able to lick its wound. Our pets aren’t always the best behaved patients, so sometimes we need to protect them from themselves.
7. The price you are given includes all this as standard. We believe all these things are important and should be done every time, so we include them in the price we give you.

To find our how much it costs to desex your pet, call us at the Bunbury Vet Clinic on 97215999 or Eaton Vet Clinic on 97250399. If you would like to meet us before you book your pet in, please ask our receptionist for a FREE pre-desexing check with one of our vets.