Ann Wortinger BIS, LVT, VTS (ECC) (SAIM) (Nutrition) joins Dr. Andy Roark to discuss the four relationship types pet owners have with their pets (Anthropomorphic, Integrated, Chattel, and Mixed), how these relationships present in the exam room, and how veterinary professionals can adjust their messaging to interface successfully.
LINKS
Uncharted Veterinary Conference April 21-23, 2022: unchartedvet.com/uncharted-april-2022/
Uncharted Podcast on iTunes: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-…st/id1449897688
Charming the Angry Client On-Demand Staff Training: drandyroark.com/on-demand-staff-training/
What’s on my Scrubs?! Card Game: drandyroark.com/training-tools/
Dr. Andy Roark Swag: drandyroark.com/shop
All Links: linktr.ee/DrAndyRoark
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Ann Wortinger BIS, LVT, VTS (ECC) (SAIM) (Nutrition), Elite FFCP
Ann is a 1983 graduate of Michigan State University and got her specialty certification in Emergency/ Critical Care in 2000, in Small Animal Internal Medicine in 2008 and in Nutrition in 2013. In 2020 she attained her Elite Fear Free certification.
She has worked in general, emergency, specialty practice, education and management. Ann is active in her state, national and specialty organizations, and served on the organizing committees for Internal Medicine and Nutrition. She has mentored over 20 fellow VTSs and has worked on a variety of committees and positions. She is currently an instructor and Academic Advisor for Ashworth College’s Veterinary Technology Program, as well as an active speaker and writer.
Ann has over 50 published articles in various professional magazines as well as book chapters and a book, Nutrition and Disease Management for Veterinary Technicians and Nurses in its second edition in 2016 coauthored with Kara Burns. Ann received the 2009 Service Award for her state association (MAVT), the 2010 Achievement Award for the Academy of Internal Medicine for Veterinary Technicians (AIMVT), and in 2012 received the Jack L. Mara Memorial Lecture Award presented at NAVC.
Her fur/feather/fin family consists of 4 resident cats, multiple foster kittens, chickens and a pond full of goldfish.
SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Andy Roark:
Welcome everyone to the Cone of Shame Veterinary Podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Andrew Roark. Got a super interesting one for you today. It’s me and veterinary technician extraordinaire, Ann Wortinger sitting down. We are talking about the four types of relationships that pet owners have with their pets. We get into those, breakdown what the four types are, what they look like. As soon as Ann started laying these down, I was like, yep. I have seen all of these. It’s just a neat way to segment those clients in your mind so you can understand what their relationship is. You can tailor your communication style to them. You can tailor your treatment plan presentation to them. You can help guide the care for that pet in the way that’s going to be most effective in advocating for that pet. Totally worth the time, totally worth the energy. I hope this makes you think about the cases that you are seeing in the clinic and how we approach those cases. Without further ado, let’s get into this episode.
Kelsey Beth Carpenter:
This is your show. We’re glad you’re here. We want to help you in your veterinary career. Welcome to Cone of Shame with Dr. Andy Roark.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Welcome Ann Wortinger to the podcast. Thanks for being here.
Ann Wortinger:
Thank you for asking me, Dr. Roark.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh, my pleasure. You are well-known in the veterinary technician community. You currently teach at a vet tech program. You have not one VTS, but three VTS, veterinary technician specialties. It’s small animal internal medicine, emergency critical care and nutrition. Is that correct?
Ann Wortinger:
Yes. Yep.
Dr. Andy Roark:
That’s amazing. That’s incredible.
Ann Wortinger:
And on two organizing committees, which when you’re on an organizing committee, they say you have to be exquisitely qualified. So not only do you need to meet all the qualifications for any of the applicants, but instead of five years, it has to be seven years. You have to be published. You have to speak. All that fun stuff too.
Dr. Andy Roark:
I have never been exquisitely qualified for anything in my life.
Ann Wortinger:
I have been twice.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, exactly. If someone was like, we need this burrito eaten as fast as possible, then I would be exquisitely qualified. Sure of that. I got nothing. Well, so thanks for being here. You do a variety of lectures. You’ve published all over the place. You’ve got lots of articles. You’ve got some book chapters and you speak all over the place. I saw a presentation that you were putting on called four relationship types clients have with their pets.
Ann Wortinger:
Yes.
Dr. Andy Roark:
And as a communication guy, that was really interesting to me. I think that we all know that when we talk to clients, it’s not a one size fits all conversation. People are different. I’ve always really tried to lean into that. I think there’s some general approaches that we take to talk to clients, but everybody’s an individual. The more that you recognize them as an individual, the more you can tailor your communication to that person, their values, their needs, their wants, their desires, their worldview, their self-identity, the more effective you can be. And so now we’re getting down in the weeds a bit. But I’m always looking for tools in my toolbox to help me kind of sort people and spot kind of what they care about and how I might best approach them to advocate for their pet. And so if you don’t mind, can you go ahead and just lay down the general premise of the idea that there are different relationships that pet owners have with their pets?
Ann Wortinger:
Sure. There are three primary relationships that people have with their pets. I think we all recognize that clients, they have an anthropomorphic relationship, or those that give their animals human feelings and human understanding. Then we have integrated, which is usually a client who’s got some scientific background who views their animal as a pet but it is a member of the family. Then we have chattel. Chattel relationships are usually they have no emotions between the owner and the animal. That doesn’t mean that somebody else in the family or in the area does not have an emotional relationship with the animal. But these animals are seen as property. They are a tool. They are a way to get something done. We see this with guard dogs. We can see this with police dogs. Now the police department will see this dog as a tool. The handler most likely has an integrated relationship with it, so we can have mixed. It depends on what you’re doing and who you’re working with.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, so that’s the fourth card, right, is mixed? Different feelings.
Ann Wortinger:
Yeah, because they can’t just be straight up simple in veterinary medicine.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Well, but our relationships with pets are complicated. You talked a little bit about mixed relationship being within an individual, meaning a person-
Ann Wortinger:
No, within usually a family. Each person, though you can have people that are anthropomorphic. Those of us that have gone into veterinary medicine that have an anthropomorphic relationship, when we start facing burnout, our relationship type will change with our patients. We may become more of a chattel relationship where we try not to get emotionally involved with our patients at all. That is a consequence that we are seeing more often with burnout in our field.
Dr. Andy Roark:
I’ve seen the other way with pet owners. Right. We’ve all seen the stoic guy who comes in who’s kind of like, “This cat is just a cat.” You say, “Well, your cat is really sick.” He goes, “Really?” I mean, he had this idea of like… You know, it’s funny, you don’t know what you got until it’s gone or almost gone. You know what I mean? I’ve seen pet owners, I think that they were maybe, I don’t know. I’m just guessing that they were maybe raised with the chattel sort of approach of pets live in the yard and that’s what they are. There’s nothing tighter than a family member who didn’t want a pet and the pet after they got the pet.
Ann Wortinger:
Oh, you’ve seen pictures of my husband. Have you?
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. I see the guy under the big cat.
Ann Wortinger:
No, the guy with three cats, four cats on him every evening because we have two foster kittens. This is one, this is Kevin.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh wow.
Ann Wortinger:
We’ve had them since they were four weeks old. We have two of our adult cats prefer my husband. We let the cats choose. They’ve got their spots on his chair. Then the foster kittens come in. They’re like, well, we want in on this.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. That’s funny. Let’s go back to the vet side of this. Talk to me a little bit more about burnout moving people between these relationships. Because when you said that, I go, oh my gosh, I’ve totally seen that. I have 100% seen anthropomorphizing person who just sort of detaches a bit from the clients.
Ann Wortinger:
I mean, we used to see this primarily in shelter medicine, just because it’s such high volume and high stress that the person that goes in, we call them puppy huggers. They go in and oh my God, I love all the puppies. I love all the kittens. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Then two, three, four years down the line, they’re like, you know, just get them in, get them out. Don’t have any relationship. Don’t remember names of the animals. Don’t remember their history. They’re just done. The more you care, the more it hurts.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. Yeah.
Ann Wortinger:
You can only take so much before you just pull back and say, I’m done. I can’t do this anymore, but maybe they’re credentialed. Maybe they’re a veterinarian. They don’t know they have another option, so they just leave the field. I mean, we’re seeing that in droves right now, that they just get so burnt out from their level of care that they’re not animals anymore, they’re just a means to an end.
Dr. Andy Roark:
I’m going to ask you a hard question here. Do you think that it may be detrimental to that professionals to have an anthropomorphic view of patients?
Ann Wortinger:
It makes it harder scientifically I think for us. Most of us are integrated. We are looking for facts. We’re looking for science-based evidence. Most anthropomorphic people are not doing that. Anthropomorphic tends to be more feeling. I mean, this may be more of our receptionists, our assistants, but definitely there are people that make it through and get credentialed and still have that. Or you’ll have what we’re calling our soul animals. That there’s one animal that you are exquisitely attached to. You may not even realize the depth of your emotions until that animal becomes ill or you are faced with a trauma of some sort. I think we’ve all been there.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. I agree. I push a bit for the integrated mindset when I talk to especially vet students and people like that. I don’t talk a lot about because it could be an unpopular opinion. I do, I worry about the anthropomorphic people. Going into vet school is where I mostly interact with people. It is hard to have a deeply feeling attachment to every pet and to keep doing this job again and again. I know there are people with stronger hearts than mine that can do it. But for me-
Ann Wortinger:
It’s hard.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. For me, part of wellness, part of self-care has been shifting to the integrated idea of I recognize the value of this pet and the value of this life. At the same time, I can’t, I just can’t live in that emotional space. It’s too hard, especially when I don’t have any control about what the pet owner is going to do as far as the care of this pet. I’ve been calling it, and I really like this, the term is why I want to talk about this. I’ve been using the term professional distance and sort of talking to young doctors and saying, Hey, professional distance is a tool. You’ve got to be able to say, I don’t have control over what this pet owner is going to do and so as a result, I do need to emotionally distance myself.
Dr. Andy Roark:
I have a friend, his name is Dr. Phil Richmond. He does a lot of positive psychology. He calls it, what does he call it? He calls it cognitive empathy as opposed to emotional empathy. Emotional empathy is like, I’m going to be emotionally here with you. Cognitive empathy is more like, I understand how you feel and I understand the importance, but I’m not emotionally coming to where you are. To me, that kind of fits with the integrated approach, or at least what I’ve kind of picked up as a self-protection mechanism to get things done.
Ann Wortinger:
One of the other factors of an integrated relationship is sometimes, especially with that, clients will set limits as to how much time or how much money or how many visits that they will do for this animal. It may or may not be based on any fact. They’re thinking, we’re going to do space for $50. They set limits that we may or may not be able to meet. When we have an animal that is 100% recoverable, but the owners won’t spend that much money on them for whatever reason. As I told you before we started, we have chickens. One of our chickens got an eye injury back in our woods when she was about six weeks old. She was blind in one eye, not a problem. About six months later, her eye starts swelling and she can’t close it. We’re having problems.
Ann Wortinger:
Try to find a chicken doctor for an eye enucleation in the middle of a pandemic. But we went had her enucleated. My husband’s family, and they think I’m the weirdest thing ever, anyways, but I spent money like $500 money on a chicken. But because she was injured as a chick, we were very emotionally invested in her. I mean, I was not. You know, I’d spend $500 to enucleate one of my cats. Not a problem. Why wouldn’t I spend that for my chicken?
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. That’s interesting. This goes a bit back to what you were saying about vet professionals being more integrated at the workplace and then maybe more anthropomorphic at home.
Ann Wortinger:
They can be.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. I mean, I look at my own relationship with my pet. He’s my boy. I get very, very attached to my dogs and that’s probably why I became a veterinarian. I would get attached to my cats if I was allowed to have cats, but my wife is definitely allergic. And so to all the cat people who are like [crosstalk 00:13:30] cats.
Ann Wortinger:
Try the Purina LiveClear food, it is amazing. Yeah. I’m an asthmatic. I’ve been an asthmatic for 47 years. Four months after we started the food, so we got it when it first was released. I was able to stop my steroid inhaler, which I had been on for 47 years.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Wow. Wow. There you go.
Ann Wortinger:
We have four cats. I’m the one with the allergies.
Dr. Andy Roark:
You have four cats before the diet came out, which means that you were-
Ann Wortinger:
I was on a steroid inhaler. I’ve got rescue inhalers. I’m on oral meds. I’ve worked in veterinary medicine for 38 years.
Dr. Andy Roark:
I’m struggling to breathe, but I need another cat. It’s not that you had a cat, you had four cats.
Ann Wortinger:
Four cats, yup.
Dr. Andy Roark:
And difficulty breathing. I love it.
Ann Wortinger:
And we foster. The kittens aren’t on the adult food so they tend to bother me a little bit more sometimes.
Dr. Andy Roark:
That’s funny.
Ann Wortinger:
We still do it.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Circling back, I very much have an anthropomorphic relationship with my pets. I talk to them. I ask them how they’re doing. They have no monetary value to me. I’m going to do what-
Ann Wortinger:
But you would not set a limit as to what you would be willing to invest in your pets. Now, when we give clients estimates, we go in usually with a plan A, plan B, plan C. With an anthropomorphic client, they will tell us to do anything, do anything. They are not willing to pay for us to do anything because they want us to do it for a learning experience or as a research project or something like that. Integrated will usually have limits as to, you know, I can’t pay more than a thousand dollars or $3,000, whatever.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Okay. Let me say this back to you slightly differently, right? When we talk about chattel, there’s not an emotional attachment. This reminds me of old school veterinary medicine where you were doing food animal medicine. You say, this animal has value.
Ann Wortinger:
Well, it’s definitely for anybody who’s raising livestock for a living. My chickens are living lawn ornaments. They have no intrinsic value, but you know, any of our large animal livestock producers, those are chattel relationships. But they will allow us to spend considerable amounts of money to save that LDA on a good producing dairy cow, or the proptosed uterus on one of the beef cattle that really drops nice looking calves. They will spend a lot more money than some of our other clients will.
Dr. Andy Roark:
With the chattel, they don’t have an emotional attachment so those decisions are pretty much financial. The one I’ve heard that is lunacy that I hear is something like, I spend a hundred dollars on this dog and that’s as much as I’m going to spend now. I’m like, that doesn’t make any sense.
Ann Wortinger:
No vaccines, no fecals, no nothing.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. Something like that. That to me seems chattel. When you talk about the integrated approach. You talked about your chicken with the eye problem, right. You clearly spent more treating this chicken than the street value of a chicken.
Ann Wortinger:
Of the $3 chick, yes.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, exactly right. Even if you factor in all the eggs, they’re not paying for that eye enucleation.
Ann Wortinger:
At that age, she was not producing even.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh yeah. You’re a great vet tech, terrible investor is what I’m hearing.
Ann Wortinger:
Yep. Well, they are our pets. For the most part, they are outdoor animals. We do not have indoor chickens. But when I’m out in the yard, they’re with me seeing what I’m digging up, seeing what I’m getting into. For my husband, they’re just entertainment in the backyard. We do have more of an integrated relationship with them. That they get warmed. They get fecals. We buy good quality food. They have expensive housing.
Dr. Andy Roark:
It sounds like you do enjoy them. You enjoy their personalities. It sounds like you’re willing to go above and beyond to take care of them with the recognition that, and I don’t know how to say this, that they are chickens.
Ann Wortinger:
Yes.
Dr. Andy Roark:
And they have a relatively limited lifespan.
Ann Wortinger:
We were just talking, one of my hens we think is about six years old right now. Eight is the longest I’ve had them.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Right. That seems like a fairly integrated approach with me as opposed to the money is no object, do everything. I want to evolve this conversation a bit back towards communication in the exam room and talking to these people. I’m sure there are, but are there differences in how you communicate to people when you are getting signs of these relationships?
Ann Wortinger:
Yeah. When you’re talking to somebody with an anthropomorphic relationship, they work better with simile. That if you were going in and saying, we need to do an ovariohysterectomy and she’s like, oh my God, my friend had a hysterectomy and it was the worst thing in her life. You’re like, no. We want to make sure they don’t reproduce. We go in very fact-driven, and these people are very emotional-driven. We have to figure out a way to get around that, to get what the animal needs, which is what our big concern is. Get what the animal needs and get the owner to understand that. That if we explain that Muffy, if she is not spayed, she can develop pyometra, it always happens on the weekend or on holidays, or she could get pregnant.
Ann Wortinger:
Because she’s such a small dog, the pregnancy may be difficult. We don’t want to contribute to more unloved animals in the world. Things along that line instead of just going in facts-driven and saying, this is what she needs. She’s six months old. We’re going to do it.
Dr. Andy Roark:
My instinct is to often try to counter with facts because it feels like it’s bringing it down from an overly emotional place. When I say that, what I mean is when the person comes in and they have these great concerns, I want to try to use data to try to bring them down. But what you’re saying is it’s probably better to go and try to engage with them in that emotional language and help them understand how this is going to be okay.
Ann Wortinger:
Trying to get them to change what they are thinking. I guess the biggest one we have is male owners and dog neutering. Trying to explain to those big biker dudes that their pit bull needs to be neutered, especially if he’s out running around the neighborhood. They can come in very anthropomorphic that this is his bud, we do everything together. He’s got goggles for the bike. All that sort of stuff. You’re like, yeah. He needs to be neutered. If we talk about pet overpopulation and unloved animals and not being able to take care of everybody, sometimes that will get us where we need them to go. Does that make sense?
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. That definitely makes sense. I try to think back about conversations I’ve had that have been successful with these guys. I think a lot of times just things like this will make the world easier and less frustrating for him. They kind of get that. They’re like, oh, yeah. I can kind of see. Also, other dogs are less likely to fight with him, give him a hard time. That kind of hits on that emotional thing of, I don’t want my buddy to have a hard time. Really what they’re trying to do in their way is they want their dog to have the best life, in their mind as they understand it. Because they’re anthropomorphizing. I’ve heard a lot of different explanations of neutering, and kind of how you explain it. I think the ones that lean into the simile, here’s a way to look at it that these people understand it in their own life that’s not data-driven but helps them to understand the experience of the pet. That definitely makes sense.
Ann Wortinger:
When my kids were younger, we brought home a cerebellar hyperplasia cat. We, I did. She developed hyperplasia secondary to getting thrown out of a car on the highway. My kids were very upset about her trauma. I would always tell them that not everybody feels the same way that we do about animals, and that our job was to ensure that she had the best life and she remembered none of this. That she was young enough as a kitten. She was found during a rainstorm on one of our dug in highways, they flooded. She was never comfortable with storms. Whether that was something to do with that or her cerebellar input or exactly what. We used to tease my oldest son that his first girlfriend was brain damaged in the wrong species because she thought he was all that and a bag of chips.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Hey guys, I just got to jump in real quick with a couple housekeeping items. Number one on my list with big red underlines under it, registration for the April Uncharted Veterinary Conference is open. It is not like anything else that is out there. It is, oh, it is energizing. It is motivating. It is inspiring. It is fun. It will get you fired up about your career and your practice again. This year’s conference is all about running smoother, simpler, more enjoyable and rewarding practices. That’s what it is. You’re like, I’m not a practice owner. If you are a leader in practice, you see yourself as a leader. If you plan to be a leader in the future, this conference is for you. Come and be a part of it. Check out the link, it’s in the show notes. Learn more about the Uncharted Conference. I would love to have you there.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Second point of order, over on the Uncharted Veterinary Podcast front, my friend, Stephanie Goss and I get into a brand new podcast topic. We’re talking about finding the perfect job. We had someone writing and they’re like, Hey, I’m getting ready to look for a job and I have no idea what to look for. And I don’t want to end up in a toxic dump. I don’t want it to be terrible. I don’t want to be awful or horrible, a decision that I’ve made that I’ll regret for the rest of my life. What do I do? And Stephanie and I unpacked that. If you were thinking about, Hey, I’d like to maybe get another job at some point. That’s the episode for you.
Dr. Andy Roark:
If you’re thinking, Hey, I’d like to hire somebody and I would like to do the things that Andy Roark is telling people that they should look out for in a good practice, you might also want to watch this new video episode. Anyway, guys, that’s over there on the Uncharted Podcast. It is free as always. Get it wherever you get your podcast. Get it wherever you got this podcast. Let’s do it right now. Let’s get back into this episode. Let’s shift over and look at the integrated relationships. Approaching them versus the anthropomorphic.
Ann Wortinger:
You’re usually going to be able to go in with your facts. If you stick with the spay and neutering that prevent pyometra, prevent unwanted pregnancies, prevent mammary cancer. If you want to throw in statistics, you can throw in your statistics. Sometimes we have tended to undervalue our services, so when we give them a $300 quote for a spay, sometimes they have a problem with that. And then we can go in and say, well, we’ve added in extra monitoring because that’s important. We do pre blood work so that we can detect anything. It isn’t just the put them on the table anymore.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. As you’re saying that, I’m thinking about all the times that I’ve seen people use that exact language with your anthropomorphic clients and how it doesn’t go well.
Ann Wortinger:
No, and it’s not. They would pay the $300 no question, but if you say, and we’re going to have monitoring the entire time that they’re under anesthesia, we’re going to put an IV catheter in just to make sure that there’s not any problems. That would go over much better, then even doing a monetary breakdown on it so that they know that we’re taking care of Fluffy and we’re keeping her warm. We’re going to have a blanket inside the cage and one on the table. Those are the sort of things that’s going to make a difference for the anthropomorphic.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. It’s very funny that when we talk to clients, often the conversations look a bit similar from the outside, but in some cases we’re having a justify this price conversation. In some cases we are having a help me understand and make me feel safe conversation. We’ve all gotten those conversations wrong, meaning I thought we were having a justify the price conversation and we’re not. Or I thought we were having a make me feel safe conversation and this person is like, no, I just don’t understand why an IV catheter cost $65. And you go, oh.
Ann Wortinger:
I think one of the advantages of having a technician go in and give estimates instead of doctors is we get less of the justify the price, or they think they can wheedle the price different with a doctor than they can with a technician. But technicians are better at presenting those things, I think, than a doctor is. Doctors are so fact-based. And not that technicians aren’t, but we can bring it down to the client level. I think we can switch gears a little quicker.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. I think that’s probably true. I’ve seen that again and again, technicians being better than doctors at presenting estimates as a sweeping rule. That definitely makes, that makes sense to me as well. I have also found that the doctors kind of have the power to make the changes on the fly. And so they go, well, maybe we don’t need this monitoring. The technician would never say, maybe we don’t need this monitoring. Also, I would point out the fact that doctors can say, maybe we don’t need this monitoring, doesn’t mean that they should. As a softie who wants clients to like me, I have battled that urge and impulse my entire career.
Ann Wortinger:
Yeah. I mean, we know what we need, but we also we know what the animal needs and we will put usually what’s to their advantage over what’s to our advantage.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. No, I agree. Then tips for communicating with the chattel people. Everybody wants to know.
Ann Wortinger:
Hey, that’s just straight up facts that… We have, because Detroit is a border city, we would deal with the border docs. You have to get the permission from the department, and all they want is the numbers. They have a chattel relationship. Then you’ve got this big, strong TSA guy who’s worried about his dog that’s maybe blown an ACL or whatever. If we can tell the department that we can get this dog back to full function in six weeks with a surgery, they’ll sign off on it. The handler is not the one paying for this. This is the department. The handler is going to be doing all the work and that’s who we’re going to talk to as far as animal care. So that one dog has two different relationships attached to it. We see that often in our police dogs and I’m sure most any clinic deals with their local police force that has any dogs component to that. But we also get the airport dogs, the border dogs, campus dogs. All sorts of things.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. No, that definitely makes sense. One of the things I think is really interesting is when you have that mixed relationship inside the family. I tell a story. I had this Boykin Spaniel, which is the state dog of South Carolina. It came in. I saw it just like once a year for a couple years. Every time it would come in, this guy would bring it in, and it always had nasty ear infections. It had fleas and it had missing-
Ann Wortinger:
And Spaniel ears.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, exactly. It totally had Spaniel ears. It always smell. It just had a yeasty smell all the time. Every time I saw it, it was just kind of a hot mess. I would argue with the guy, I try to get him to clear this up but he never seemed all that interested. Then one day, I come in to see him for his annual appointment. There’s this guy and there’s this young lady who’s with him. She has a big rock on her finger. She says, “I want you to clean this dog up so he doesn’t stink.” And I said, “Yes, ma’am.” She was like, “Just do everything. I don’t want to live with a stinky dog. I want this dog to be clean and well taken care of.” She was ready. We cleaned it. We got that dog’s ears under control. We got that dog’s skin under control. That dog went on regular flea and heartworm prevention and stayed there.
Dr. Andy Roark:
I wanted to take the lady aside where fiance wasn’t around and be like, you can’t leave this man because this dog will suffer if you do. Like this dog will go back into neglect. But you better believe that every communication that I can have thereafter is going to loop her in as much as possible. I don’t want to talk to the guy about what we should do because I know what that guy’s behavior is going to be. He’s definitely more in the chattel camp and she’s definitely more in the at least integrated to possibly anthropomorphic camp of this is now our family dog. That means something.
Ann Wortinger:
Good for the dog.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yes. Oh gosh. Yeah, that dog won the jackpot when that guy proposed. But yeah, it is just interesting. You see those relationships, and a lot of times I think to your point at the very beginning, when we start talking about this mixed relationship. The person making the financial decisions in the family may very well not be the person who has the actual loving relationship with that pet. And so expanding the people in the conversation can be really valuable for us.
Ann Wortinger:
Yeah. I mean, we see sometimes with, especially families with small children. Children kind of suck everything in and you don’t have any time or feeling left. You’ll have people move into a chattel relationship when their children are small. The children are very anthropomorphic because they’re living in rainbow bright and all that. The parents may only do something for the child’s benefit rather than the animal’s benefit.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. That makes sense. It’s really is about sort of in those cases, trying to understand the values at play here. I coach doctors sometimes in exam room communication and say, you know, one of the tricks is to not always talk about what you think is most important, it’s to try to figure out what they think is most important and then talk to them about that. And so when we talk about the kid’s dog, my tendency is to talk about the damage that intestinal parasites can do to a poor dog. It’s probably going to be a lot more effective for me to talk about the risk of internal parasites around children and how-
Ann Wortinger:
Doing that little [capsy 00:32:47] handout.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. There you go. But that’s exactly it, right? It really is try to understanding the value system of the person you’re dealing with and just try to put it in language that they understand and that’s going to make its way up their priority list. Their priority list may be very different than yours and mine.
Ann Wortinger:
Especially when we’re dealing with young adults, they may have been raised in a different setting. Maybe they were raised in a chattel family and then they grow up and they’re like, oh, this animal is really amazing. They never did vaccines and they never did fecals. We only saw the vet to have them euthanized. How can we change that?
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, I think that’s a period of time we’re sort of been going through in vet medicine. I wonder if we’re coming out the other side. It used to be, jump back 30, 40 years ago, pets were outside. That’s just what they were. They stayed in the barn and they stayed outside. Then in the last 30, 40 years, they have moved inside, but it’s been at different speeds. There’s people who were really late to that. There’s people who were at the beginning of that. I feel like the young generation of pet owners we see today mostly had pets inside as opposed to the older generation. We get to just navigate that with people as they sort of start to expand their relationship. It’s just, I don’t know, it’s interesting.
Ann Wortinger:
Well, with the declaw debate we’re having right now. All of our cats have always been declawed. But this is what research is showing us. The arthritic changes that we’re seeing and the changes in posture and gait and how many… If we think they’re integrated, we can throw all that data at them instead of just saying, you know, this is painful and there are other things we can do to, you know, you don’t even know if the six weeks old kitten is going to tear up your couch.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. That’s a great point. It is those chattel relationships when it comes to declawing that make veterinarians want to pull their hair out. It’s the people who say, well, she’s not going to tear up my leather couch. And you say, that has not been an issue. There are things we can do about that. But they do a math equation of kitten worth less than couch or worth less than furniture. It’s very hard if they won’t listen to the data on pain and long term problems with declawing and they don’t have that anthropomorphic view where we can lean into the pain and discomfort of the procedure. Boy, that’s the only time that we end up in these situations and it can be hugely frustrating.
Ann Wortinger:
Yep. Especially when you’ve got a client that’s very insistent and is used to having their way. They’re used to bullying people to get what they want and they’ll start at the receptionist and just work up the line.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s true. It is true. Well, one of the things I think is also changing our profession. I think it’s really good. The pandemic has been a challenge for a lot of practices, and we do, as you said, have a lot of burnout. I think we’re seeing more of that. I’m a perpetual optimist. I think that a lot of us have been pushed to the point of making some boundaries that are long overdue making.
Ann Wortinger:
Yeah. Especially for technicians that, you know, don’t call me on the weekends, don’t call me after hours. When I was working in practice, I had an hour to an hour and a half drive each way. That was my decompression time that I had no kids, I had no intercoms, I had no doctor. I could listen to what I wanted to listen to. By the time I’ve got home, I had transitioned to homework and dinner and all that stuff. Actually the drive was not a bad thing. If I had only lived 20 minutes from home, I would’ve had a much harder time transitioning and making sure that I was not still in tech mode when I got home and could be the parent that the kids needed at that time.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. I’m talking a lot these days about what I call practical boundaries for busy practices. Letting people be off and enforcing their off time I think is a boundary that its time has come.
Ann Wortinger:
I think setting boundaries with clients too. You cannot expect to walk in and be seen every day. You cannot expect, maybe we were able to do this before. I adopted a pandemic kitten, one of my foster fails. I have not been in the clinic for any of his visits, but I sent his distraction mat, I sent his churros with him. They get a note. They get an update. That’s just what they have to do. This is a doctor that I’ve worked with over 10 years now. That’s how she’s running her practice. It’s like, that’s fine. If that’s what you need to do, then that’s what we will do.
Dr. Andy Roark:
No, I think that that’s where we’re going.
Ann Wortinger:
A lot of clients are having problems with that.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh yeah. Well, that’s why I wanted to talk about this, the relationship types, anything that helps us sort of communicate with these people and find out what they sort of care about so we can get to it. Again, I can empathize with the pet owners as well and say, it’s frustrating, especially if your pet has an ear infection and someone says to you, you’re going to have to wait three hours to get in and get seen. You go, well, I got to go to work. I’ve got my kids at school and I got to pick them up. I don’t think the answer is throwing away empathy for the pet owners, but I do think that we do need to set some boundaries and say to the people, this is what we can do. This is how we can help you. We need to be creative so that we can help people, but just letting clients kind of come in and have whatever they want and do whatever they want and we’ll just suck it up or we’ll stay late or we’ll pull people in on their day off. I think those things need to be off the table.
Ann Wortinger:
Yep. I agree.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Cool. Where can people find you? Where can they read your articles? Where can they connect?
Ann Wortinger:
I do have a LinkedIn page, but not real active on it. I’m speaking at the Ontario Association of Veterinary Technicians, and what’s the other one? Washington State Vet Tech Association. Washington State is going to be live. Ontario is virtual. Even for U.S. residents, the Ontario conference was one of the better ones that is presented. It’s presented by technicians.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. Let me jump in here as well and say I love the Ontario Vet Tech Association.
Ann Wortinger:
Oh yeah.
Dr. Andy Roark:
They do such a good job. I have been to a couple of their events and they are always well done and they are just a well-organized, just passionate group of technicians. And so yeah, it’s a virtual-
Ann Wortinger:
Well, and they’re one of the self-governing groups of technicians. The provincial government, all the licensing, all the credentials, all the renewals, all the CE is done through the tech association.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. If they’re having virtual events, other technicians should take a look just because they really do great work. Guys, thanks a lot for being here and thank you so much for taking time.
Ann Wortinger:
Thank you.
Dr. Andy Roark:
That is our episode. Guys, I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you got something out of it. As always, the best, kindest, nicest thing you can possibly do for me if you like the episode is to leave an honest review on iTunes or wherever you get your podcast episodes. It’s how people find the show. It gives me some guidance about what the people like. It keeps me encouraged to keep doing the episodes, so I really appreciate it. Guys, take care of yourselves. Be well. I’ll talk to you soon.