Last week, high-end specialty and emergency veterinary hospital network BluePearl announced in a press release that, based on data from all ninety of its hospitals throughout the United States, there had been a 70% increase in canine parvovirus cases during the COVID-19 pandemic compared with the same period in the previous five years.
Although maintaining that “that the absence of a broader COI [Conflict of Interest] statement by the authors does not constitute […]
Your feedback is most welcome and sincerely appreciated at editor@thecaninereview.com . Arizona Animal Medical and Surgical Center (Scottsdale) Arizona […]
The Canine Review spoke with five of the world’s most renowned 24-hour veterinary specialty hospitals about how they have navigated challenges posed by the pandemic and how they are moving forward as America heads into summer and reopens against a backdrop of economic recession, 100,000 plus virus-related deaths, historic unemployment, state and city budget deficits, violent police protests, and so much uncertainty.
VPI (or Veterinary Pet Insurance), founded in 1980, was the first company to sell pet insurance in the United States. In 2009, the company was purchased by Nationwide.
Nationwide/VPI has been and remains the largest and most popular pet insurer in the U.S. market, with 36.33% of the market share, according to NAPHIA.
While it may be the oldest and the most popular, TCR also found that it had some of the worst pitfalls of any insurer.
For starters, there appears to be a directive in place instructing customer service/insurance agents not to send even sample or boilerplate copies of the company’s pet insurance product to any individual who is not a policyholder. In other words, prospective customers are refused requests for sample policies. And it’s not as if the website makes it easy to find a copy of a policy.
AKC spokeswoman Brandi Hunter told The Canine Review that there are about 138,500 active, unique breeders as of November 2019 who are subject to AKC inspection, including the 11,000 Breeders of Merit. Ms. Hunter also said that the inspectors work about 300 days per year (there are about 240 business days in a calendar year). This means that the ten AKC inspectors would each need to conduct at least 13, 850 inspections per year – – or 46 inspections per day – – for all 300 days for all breeders with AKC-registered litters to be inspected annually.
Ms. Hunter explained that although 138,500 is the total number of breeders subject to inspection, the breeders most likely to be inspected and who take top priority for AKC inspectors are higher volume breeders producing six or more litters per year. That amounts to 5% of all breeders, or 6,925 out of the 138,500, Hunter said. Even that more modest number would be daunting for the AKC staff. Inspection chief Bach told The Canine Review that his team conducts 3,000 inspections per year, on average (or 300 inspections per inspector per year). That would mean that even assuming that only the highest priority category of breeders is subject to inspection, those breeders could only expect to be inspected once every 2.3 years. And all of the other 131,575 breeders, including thousands of Breeders of Merit, would never be inspected at all. Similarly, with only ten inspectors on its payroll, it would be impossible for even the most select category of breeders subject to inspection — the 11,000 Breeders of Merit — to be ‘routinely’ inspected, as the AKC’s website promises. If only Breeders of Merit were subject to inspection, those breeders could expect an inspection an average of every 3.6 years.