My vet wants $150 to remove a sesame seed-sized skin tag from below my dog's eye

Don’t most dogs have the tag around their neck.

Does this affect the child's. Life?

Vets are fucking scammers!!! My sister took her cat to get checked because she was peeing outside of her litter box and she suspected a uti infection. They charged her 550 dollars to do “tests” and said she the cat was completely fine and just had anxiety and for her to purchase feliway calming spray!!! Lol

As usual Robot Chicken has the answer

R1 lol, good dad joke

R3 well what ended up happening? Did the cat actually turn out to have a UTI or anxiety or what?

Pet insurance is worth every penny.

I'll remove it for you for $125.

Vets in the U.S. are very expensive.

As in R3's example, there are two types of vets. One type always acts with an abundance of caution and at maximum expense and over the greatest span of time; this vet will perform a $550 battery of tests to determine if the cat has a UT, and then end up, a week later, prescribing a $10 antibiotic. Total cost $560.

The other will, based on the same symptoms, immediately prescribe a week's worth of antibiotic and tell the cat owner how to watch for whether the treatment is working (in which case it should be continued for the full course of treatment), cost $65 + $10 Rx = $75 and the problem is in all likelihood completely resolved before the other cat has his had first pill.

[Quote] Are vets the new dentists?

Is water wet?

This thread is stupid. Vets have tons of overhead to operate safely.

R10 it's a fucking skin tag...

If it's not functionally affecting the dog, leave it alone.

Unless it is affecting the dog’s vision or there’s a risk of it turning cancerous, leave it. I’ve snipped off my own skin tags, no problem. I guess if it’s near the eye, that could be risky.

R13 I have anal skin tags but can't reach them to snip off. How do you do it?

R14--Those are warts, not 'skin tags'!

Taking your pet to the vet is like visiting an impoverished country as an obvious American.

[quote]If it's not functionally affecting the dog, leave it alone.

It's not, and I pointed this out. But the vet still insists on getting rid of it because "there's a possibility it could get caught on something and ripped off, and a skin tag can act like a pull tab and cause a larger tear in the surrounding skin."

Get insurance, dummies.

Dermatologists do the same thing. Scam artists. My mom had a skin tag on her neck. I had never seen skin tags before. The doctor strongly encouraged us to "allow" him to send the "growth" out for "testing" which came back negative for cancer BECAUSE IT WAS NOTHING BUT A HARMLESS SKIN TAG! I don't believe they sent it to lab, (but charged us for it), because it would have showed up on her insurance.

I now get them, and every couple years get them removed. My doctor has never even suggested testing any of them for cancer! I think back to that scammer that implied my mom's skin tag was skin cancer and it makes me crazy!!!!

R18 Any pet insurance plans that you know of that are worth the money - in America? We have lots of bait-and-switch scams and little consumer protection in the U.S.

R19 I'm not sure if he told me the truth, but my doctor said there is a new(ish) law that states that anything removed from our bodies must be sent out for testing. He actually told me this in hopes that I then wouldn't demand he remove the skin tag. But who knows?

Please don't put your pup through that. I've had four beagles over the past twenty years (2 still with me) and beagles get every growth known to man. Right now one has a skin tag on his eye lid, as well as a lipoma and various sebaceous cysts. Never again will I let a vet take anything off that he wasn't completely sure was cancer. My first beagle had a cyst removed from his face and the small town vet stapled the skin together. It broke my heart and you could tell my boy was uncomfortable. I'm not at all worried the skin tag on my current beagle is going to cause problems, and I'm not going to let another vet butcher my pup.

I swore I will never have a pet big enough to have a name. Fish, baby. They die, you throw them in the trash.

Pet insurance is good if you get it when your pet is a baby. I adopted two 10 year old cats and the cost for insurance was prohibitive.

I can't see any procedure costing less than $100 at a vet's office. Like R10 said, vets have overhead costs. Sounds like a cosmetic procedure that you can skip. Or wait until he has two tags and see how much it costs to get rid of two tags vs. one tag.

All the other dogs are laughing at yours.

Your dog is emabarassed to have you at the end of his leash.

True story here - and how I found out that most vets are scammers.

In 1980, my partner and I were college students and had a dog. He jumped out a half-opened car window while we were driving (he saw a squirrel) and broke his hip. The vet assured us that an $800.00 operation - $2500.00 in today's dollars - would make him good as new.

It didn't. Six months later, he could barely move, and cried in pain whenever he tried to stand up from lying down. No quality of life whatsoever.

We took him back to the Vet, who informed us that he really didn't think that the operation would do any good. The exact quote from him was, "I'm letting you know that I'm just in it for the money. And now you've learned a valuable lesson - not everybody is a good person."

And we took the dog to another Vet and had to put him down.

We got educated - big time.

Because of a vet R27 my dog has a dislocated shoulder and hip. I was able to get the surgery for the hip, $3600, and she is doing great. They can't do anything for the dislocated shoulder. Things have changed a lot of veterinary medicine. So far, trying to find out what was wrong with her because the vet didn't tell me that she either fell off the operating table or they dropped her, taking her to specialist, therapy and the surgery I'm in it for about $10,000. She will probably need therapy for the rest of her life, she is going on 15 years old, which cost me $650/month.

My cat is sick. Vomiting, diarrhea, low appetite. Last time she had similar symptoms I took her to the vet and it cost over $400 to say they can’t find a problem. I’m very reluctant to go back.

However, I have a friend going to vet school. They do not make a lot of money.

Pet insurance is worthless once your dog hits 7-8 years old and starts to need more medical care.

"Pet policies typically don’t cover pre-existing conditions, Mr. Blyskal said, so premiums are generally lower when your pet is young and healthy. Even if you start early, though, you may end up paying more over time, he said, because some policies raise premiums as pets get older. This can increase costs substantially, he said, and cause owners to drop their policies as the animals get older — just when they are more likely to need the coverage. Industrywide, the average pet policy is maintained for three years or less, according to an insurer regulatory filing in 2016 in Washington State."

YES! THEY ARE!

Considering where the skin tag is they'll most likely have to put your dog to sleep. All that costs money. If they do have to knock him out $150.00 does not sound so expensive.

Not all vets are bad. My dog was given a month to live from having a pericardial effusion when he was 6 years old from my old vet, one specialist, and one emergency vet. I went to a new vet who disagreed, and gave me a referral to Texas A&M to have him treated there. The cost was $7,000 dollars. However A&M let me go on a payment plan where I paid $1000.00 upfront, and monthly payments after that. The dog is still with me going strong after heart surgery. He turned 15 in January. Never let one asshole vet keep you from getting second, or third, or fourth opinions.

There's now a shortage of livestock vets because there's so much money in being a pet vet.

Or so I read in my students' economics textbook.

r21

Some states do require anything removed be biopsied

You can exchange your old sick dog for a new puppy at any pound.

I removed a skin tag from my dogs eye area myself by tying a small piece of sewing thread around it at the base. It cuts off circulation of blood and eventually the tag withers and falls off by itself. It would usually regrow and I would have to do it again, but at some point it stopped.

Th tricky part is keeping the dog still long enough to tie the thread properly.

My late dad did that to a skin tag on his neck R38, but he neglected the part about leaving it to fall off. Cue blood spurting from his neck, lol. Luckily that didn't kill him and he lived another twenty something years.

There is not a lot of money in being a vet. Look at their overhead. Now veterinary practices are being bought up and it is not unheard of for someone to have 20 or more practices and they don't have to be a vet to own them. Go to your vets website. More than likely it is an LLC and just follow the bread crumbs from there.