Veterinary care in France: what pet owners can expect

Living in France with pets brings different challenges from those encountered when you are a non-resident visiting your holiday home.

Instead of the usual visit to the vet for your dog’s worming tablet before returning to the UK, as a French resident your visits can take on a somewhat different format. Yes, there are routine visits for vaccinations, etc., including the ‘top-ups’ of rabies vaccination in case you need to return to the UK for any reason, but until our cat, UGN, developed a serious kidney issue just before our permanent move to France, we had been fortunate not to experience anything more serious.

Any pet can suddenly become ill, and older pets are more likely to need veterinary assistance, so it’s important to build up a relationship with a vet you trust. Fortunately, there are distinct advantages to the French veterinary system that can make building that relationship a little easier.

Previous clients of mine who still contact me for advice (veterinary medicine is never really a nine-to-five job) constantly complain that their local clinic is now owned by a ‘corporate’ and they never get to see the same vet twice. Well, this is where the French system differs somewhat from the UK.

When I qualified, only vets were allowed to own a veterinary clinic in the UK. When this rule changed in 1999, it opened the doors for non-vets, including limited companies, to become the legal owners of veterinary practices and, with venture capital investment behind them, build large chains under a single brand.

In France, although there are corporate chains, ownership is much more tightly governed. More than half of the capital and voting rights of a veterinary practice must be held by vets practising within the company, and those vets must retain effective control. From my personal experience so far, clinics also run their own out-of-hours emergency service. This means that when you need a vet out of hours, that vet may have just attended a calving on a local farm – bringing back wonderful memories of those James Herriot days when I had just qualified.

Quaint though this appears, please don’t run away with the idea that your pet won’t have the benefit of the latest that veterinary medicine has to offer.

Our stray cat Fifi’s blood results indicated he would need further sophisticated tests to rule out some serious health issues. I assumed these would not be available in a ‘semi-rural’ practice – but as they say, “When you assume you make an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me’!” I went into overdrive. I contacted a world-renowned veterinary laboratory we had used in our London clinic, re-opened my account and requested their catalogue of tests. I even ordered all the materials I might need to take the blood samples. But when I searched for the most important test, it wasn’t there. I rang the lab only to be told they didn’t offer it.

I contacted a second laboratory in the Netherlands that did offer the test and was happy to open an account for me, but then remembered my mentor’s words: “Never overlook the obvious in pursuit of the obscure” – and checked which laboratory the local clinic used. To my surprise, not only did they offer the test I was looking for, they had conveniently bundled all three tests Fifi required into a single profile – and at a lower cost.

Since Fifi is likely to need sedation again to take his blood samples now that he is feeling much better, I have planned for this to be carried out at the clinic by Dr Valentin. I have still not lost my desire to interfere, but I have become much more accepting of the fact that the British way of doing things may not be the only way
– perhaps not even the ‘best’ way.