Vet Checks

I've increasingly over the years had a lot of people asking if all the animals are vet checked.... so I wanted to touch on that quickly.

Small animals -- guinea pigs, chinchillas, rabbits, etc -- are not cats and dogs.  They do not need yearly shots or even yearly wellness checks.  Quite the opposite actually -- you could bring a perfectly healthy small animal to the vet, and the vet visit could stress the animal out... and you could take home an animal that's now starting to develop loose poos or go off their feed... due to the stress of the visit.  Also, they could pick up an illness at the veterinarian's office (did you know that chinchillas can catch bordatella and other animal illnesses) and bring those home as well.  So, the critters will surely go to the vet if they are sick and need something that only the veterinarian can provide... but they don't just go for wellness exams.

We do have a health guarantee that comes with most of our animals.  The exceptions to the health guarantee are animals that have known health problems that aren't fixable with medication (think, cataracts) or seniors (chinchillas 8+).  Our health guarantee is available online, or the relevant part of it anyway.  It's under the "Guarantees and Returns" section on our Chinchilla Sales Policy page, you can find it here

What it comes down to is this... if I think an animal is sick, I won't be listing it up for adoption, and it sure won't be going home with anyone, at least not until it's well again.  If an animal has already been listed for adoption and becomes ill, despite people possibly contacting and wanting to adopt, the animal will not leave until it is well.  End of story.

By not doing vet checks, it's not that I don't want to ensure healthy animals.  Rather, it's the opposite.  Taking small animals to the vet when there's nothing wrong has the potential to cause harm, and of course, there are real-life horror stories of breeders taking a chinchilla to the vet, it picking up bordatella there, and that illness wiping out most of their herd.  Oops.  I'd rather that not happen here... so we don't take each and every animal for wellness checks, but rather have our health guarantee instead, to ease people's minds that the animals they are getting are healthy.

I'd assume, also, that people wouldn't adopt an animal and take it home if they didn't think it was healthy... but I suppose that could be a discussion for another day...