Today has not been a good day.

The good part about vets, at least, is that even though they should charge quite a bit for many of their services (meds and upkeep are expensive), a lot of the time they're willing to give rather large discounts simply to save the animal. Both of my dogs from a few years back had to be put down (a few months apart, one from a malignant tumor on his brain, the other likely ovarian cancer), and we definitely could not afford the animal euthanasia costs while living paycheck to paycheck. We called around a bit both times and found vets that were willing to do the procedure for free simply for the sake of the animal (god, they were so damned miserable and their health kept deteriorating so quickly). Another time, I had a cat that had a kind of bad cyst on her side that needed to be drained and removed. We ultimately got it done for fairly cheap by calling around a bit until we found a vet willing to give a discount.

Really, my family shouldn't have owned pets anymore after about six years ago due to money issues, which was around the time my other two old dogs ended up being put down, but whenever we were in a tight spot, there would be a vet willing to drop the price enough that we could manage. All in all, vets do tend to be good people, even if it means harming their business a little from time to time.

Yeah, outside of spaying/neutering anything we pick up or have for any amount of time, we rarely need to take anything to a vet... but they're always such nice people, and I've never met one that didn't seem genuinely concerned about the animals, or (when it's just spaying/neutering+shots) didn't at least seem happy to have it there.