4Dogs Veterinary Services

Have you ever tried to get four dogs to hold still and face the same direction for a photograph? Never mind looking at the photographer or not panting, just gazing in more or less the same direction? Well, it's not easy.

Sometimes it seems like you only have one good dog

I had a herding dog instructor who got a fantastic photo of his 6 (extremely well trained) border collies all arrayed on bales of hay. It was a gorgeous shot. Then he told me that they had spent three hours trying to get the shot before resorting to using baling twine to tie all the collies to their allotted bale, and then after fifty or sixty (thankfully) digital shots later, they got the shot.

Running a veterinary hospital (or a household, or your life) is a lot like trying to herd dogs (or, yikes! Cats!). There are so many variables always in play, and everyone seems to always be heading in different directions. You have employee drama and client drama, and sick pet drama, and that is all before lunch!

The point of this blog is to try to help you remember why you're in this business. Whether you're a team leader, office manager, hospital manager or an owner, it's lonely at the top. The goal of this blog is to make it a little less so.

Well at least I've got four dogs in the frame...

Veterinary medicine is a tough business. We expect perfection from ourselves (or at least should) and demand it from our staff (right? You do that, right?). But here's a horrible factoid: no one's perfect. And every day from the moment when we open the hospital doors to the second our head hits the pillow at night, we are reminded of that.

We are reminded of that when we forget to thank employees for their great work, or decide to blow off poor behavior because, well, time just got away from us, and there's always tomorrow. We are reminded when we forget that we are professionals and gossip is destructive to morale, but what we're saying now, that isn't exactly gossip, is it?

Three out of four isn't bad - actually, if you look real hard you can see Ketchum's nose.

We're all running around all day trying to put fires out, helping people on the phone and dealing with a dying cat in the back. We're trying to explain for the umpteenth time to the technician that urine in the lobby is her job, and to the receptionist that guessing what is wrong with the pet over the phone is not.

And we're trying to do it all while doing a cost benefit analysis of adding a new digital dental x-ray unit versus an ultrasound machine, versus firing everyone and opening a frozen yogurt stand instead.

Success!!

Well, don't start looking at yogurt stands yet, because just like herding my dang dogs all over my property to take a photo of all four together wasn't easy - it's not impossible either. And when all is said and done, when you go home at night, hopefully some of the truth of why we all do this filters through... It really is for the dogs (and horses, and geckos, and cats, and whatever creatures you helped out today).

The point of this blog and the point of 4Dogs Veterinary Services is to help us all remember why we are here, and make our efforts to achieve those goals just a tad bit easier.