For anxious pets, a virtual vet visit can be the answer
While not right for all cases, flexibility helps
Milkshake and Pickles are reluctant travelers. So when Patience Warren needed to take the two elderly cats on a 12-hour drive in February, she was hoping to get some pharmaceutical assistance, especially for Pickles, a petite gray tabby with a history of severe motion sickness.
The dilemma: Taking Pickles to the vet typically triggered the very distress Warren was hoping to avoid.
“Within like a minute of being put into her carrier and put into the car, she would usually vomit or lose her bowels,” said Warren, a political researcher in Missouri. “She would also just cower and be really scared and meow. And I didn’t want to put her through that stress.”
Over the course of the pandemic, Warren had grown accustomed to having her own health needs met virtually, seeing a doctor, therapist, and nutritionist online. She wondered whether there were veterinarians who might prescribe anti-anxiety and motion sickness medications over a video call. When she searched online, she was surprised to discover numerous options.
“I honestly didn’t realize that virtual vets existed,” she said.
While many people have embraced virtual visits with their own doctors, use of veterinary telemedicine by pet owners has lagged. In one new survey of more than 1,200 American cat owners, 72 percent reported using telemedicine for themselves, compared with just 3 percent who had used it for their felines.
“But things are changing, and things are changing fast,” said Carly Moody, an animal welfare researcher at the University of California, Davis, who conducted the survey, which has not yet been published, as part of an ongoing project studying telemedicine for cats.
During the pandemic, many states loosened restrictions on veterinary telemedicine and many clinics as well as pet owners tried remote appointments for the first time. Some states are now considering permanently expanding their use.
Although hurdles remain, and it’s not appropriate for all pet care scenarios, scaling up telemedicine could bring a variety of benefits, experts said, like improving access to veterinary care and reducing stress for travel-averse pets like Pickles.
For veterinary medicine, COVID-19 “served as a catalyst for change that was necessary,” said Dr. Christina Tran, a veterinarian at the University of Arizona who is on the board of directors of the Veterinary Virtual Care Association and is a paid adviser to a veterinary telehealth company.
Some forms of telehealth are decades old; veterinarians have long fielded frantic calls from pet owners or consulted with colleagues over e-mail.
But remote video appointments are newer. “Before the pandemic, it was not very common to utilize telemedicine in that way,” said Dr. Lori Teller, the president of the American Veterinary Medical Association, who is also on the faculty at Texas A&M University, where she has developed a veterinary telehealth program. She is also a compensated adviser for another veterinary telehealth company.
In part, that stemmed from restrictive state laws, many of which required veterinarians to have a preexisting relationship with an animal — including having given a prior hands-on exam — before treating them remotely.
But when the pandemic began, some states temporarily eased their requirements. Veterinary practices turned to telemedicine to conserve personal protective equipment and flatten the coronavirus curve. The share of vets offering remote video appointments rose to 30 percent from 4 percent, according to one survey of American and Canadian clinicians.
Pet owners who had never considered virtual care suddenly had few other options. One morning in May 2020, Kristyn Booth, an educator who then lived in Austin, discovered that her dog’s eye, which had been injured nearly a decade prior, was bulging and red. The veterinarian would only offer a virtual appointment.
Initially, Booth was nervous. “How can they do this?” she recalled thinking. “It’s her eye.”
But the veterinarian suggested that Booth drive Lily, a redbone coonhound, to the office and take the virtual appointment in the parking lot. If the situation looked serious, they could rush Lily inside.
So Booth sat inside her car and showed the doctor Lily’s eye over a video call. She followed the vet’s instructions to gently press around the dog’s eye socket and look under her eyelid for blood. “I felt like I was a vet that day,” she said.
The doctor prescribed eye drops and sent Booth and Lily on their way.
Last year, when Lily’s eye got worse, Booth used a video call again; this time, the doctor took one look and knew it was time for the injured eye to come out, Booth said. Lily has coped well, she said, adding, “She’s great. She’s old now, and we do everything we can to keep her happy and healthy.”
Some organizations are pushing for a more permanent expansion of virtual vet care.
“The pandemic really did open up our eyes to the utilization of telemedicine,” said Kevin O’Neill, the vice president of state affairs for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which is urging states to loosen their rules around telemedicine. “We see it as a real key component to establishing a broader ability for patients and pet owners to be able to access that vet care that’s so badly needed.”
In June 2022, 26 percent of American pet owners reported that there had been times over the previous two years when they had been unable to access veterinary care, according to a survey of 5,000 people conducted by the ASPCA, which provided the data to The New York Times. Twothirds of them said that their pets would probably be “seen by a veterinarian more often” if they could use telemedicine.
Although not all medical care can be provided through a screen, routine appointments such as post-surgical follow-ups or behavioral consultations work fine from a distance, experts said.
Telemedicine could be especially useful for rural pet owners, who may live hours from an animal clinic, as well as those who cannot afford to take time off from work or lack reliable transportation, experts said. Virtual triage services could help people determine whether their pets’ symptoms require in-person care or can be monitored at home.
“And then we open up those appointments for the brick and mortar so that they can in fact see things that need to be seen in person,” Tran said.
After Friendship Hospital for Animals, in Washington, D.C., began offering telemedicine appointments for some patients in April 2020, some veterinarians soon found them to be more trouble than they were worth. “Because our patients can’t tell us their symptoms like a person can, I am relying on a pet owner to interpret their symptoms,” said Dr. Christine Klippen, an emergency veterinarian at the hospital. “And that can sometimes be very, very wrong.”