I am fairly "new again" to horses having taken almost 20 years off to go to college and start a career and family.
Most of the vets I have had to deal these past 3 years since my return have been amazing, yet recently I purchases a stallion at auction, and before any barn woul take him from quarantine he needed to be gelded. The vet that the quarantine barn uses quoted me a price of $320- 390 to castrate my newly purchased 16.1hh TB stallion. My normal vet quoted me $620-690 plus it would have cost me to transport him to her and back to a barn, whereas the QT vet would do it on the lawn of the barn.
I decided to try and save the $300-400 (plus the shipping expenses) and made an appointment. Nobody ever told me that I would have to be there, much less assist, but I did go so I could be there in case things went wrong and a decision had to be made...
Well, I ended up having to "kneel" on his neck and pull his leg up by means of a rope... Well, since I am already 6'2 and over 220 I didn't want to put all of my weight on his neck and ended up throwing my back out of whack and have had to see the chiropractor 3 times a week for the past 3 weeks since this happened.
Anyway, the barn owner called the vet back out 6 days after the surgery due to complications with edema all the way down his underside...
The vet charged me $495 (100 more than the high end quote) and I just received a bill for 365.61 with $125.20 of that being another farm call and sheath cleaning... The sheath cleaning I am IRATE about because I had already cleaned his sheath!
Is this typical? I have never had any of the other equine vets "do business" this way, i.e. charging full farm calls for repeat visits for "same" procedure, etc...