Let me guess: it was diet kitty food, dry?

Rene: it was just the receptionist. While to us they appear to be
representing the vet, they do not always limit their behavior to
that their bosses would endorse. Call the main vet and tell him
about why you are leaving them and the receptionist's response.
He/she would probably want to know. (The people who answer
the telephone in any number of types of businesses have a great
deal of power and know it. Until you zoom over their heads and
speak with their bosses. Before any of you get mad at me for this,
I WAS a receptionist for three years.)

I have a part time job as a receptionist at a vet clinic.  I know that if
one of our regulars called up and asked us to fax their records somewhere
else, I would definitely ask them what was up.  At the same token, we HAVE
had a couple of our regulars get a second opinion somewhere else (just in
case) but they still return to us for regular vet care.

However, if someone calls us up wanting us to fax their records, and I
wasn't familiar with them (i.e. they didn't partake in regular maintenance
vet care) then they would simply be transferred and deactivated without a
question.  We can't waste our time crying to our clients to find out why
they are switching vets.  It just starts to sound really desperate and makes
us look bad.

Kelly

[...]

I changed vets back when Shadow was very ill with IBD. First, they
wanted to vaccinate him (10 years old, always vaccinated up until
illness) and kept bugging me about it every time I took him in for
something related to his IBD. The final straw was one morning when
he was clearly ill, drooling, (this was not long after his bout
with hepatic lipidosis and his feeding tube (was FeLV+ from a blood
transfusion - another bad vet's f.ck up) and he'd been on
prescription dry food, Hills ZD, then Hills ID) nauseous, and
clearly needed something to settle his stomach and the vet examined
him, did full blood work, and had the nerve to tell me that he was
upset because "you came home a little late last night" (he was
hiding when I came home AT 10PM (!) and it took me over an hour to
find him) and that he'd be ok when he ate something (which he
wouldn't do - he couldn't eat!) and sent us on our way without
anything to give him, nor recommendations. Changed vets, who told
me to get him off of Hills prescription food, something easier to
digest, homemade even. There was a drug he'd had for nausea but
didn't seem to work, and the new vet said the dose could be
increased because of his size and that helped. I had two cats at
the time with health issues and they never resolved/made
comfortable either one, and I spent a couple hundred $$ per cat
every couple of months with that vet. I never felt bad that I
switched. I owed them nothing.

Even before Shadow got sick I asked about how to get weight off of
him (he was about 18 lbs before he got sick), and both vets at that
practice said it was hopeless. One said sedentary cats sit around
and groom themselves on the couch all day (offered no advice how to
change that, or that it could be changed at all), and the other
said she had a fat cat that she couldn't slim down.