Wolf Creek Animal Care

I've been taking my Golden Retrievers here for a while and loved my experience, until it was time to say goodbye to one of my girls. She had a tumor on her spleen, the prognosis wasn’t good. The doctor didn’t recommend surgery. We took her home to enjoy her final days, nobody knows when the end will be near with this. I asked the day we found out her condition how the process would be when it was time to let her go. I was given the impression that we would be able to call and just come in and they would take care of it right away. That is not the case. We got to enjoy our sweet girl for almost two months before she rapidly declined. We decided on a day to let her go and did a bucket list of things she liked to do. We celebrated her birthday early since we knew she wouldn’t make it a couple more weeks. The day we had chosen to let her go turns out was the day she chose as well. That morning she had collapsed and couldn’t get up. We immediately rushed her to Wolf Creek. We arrived early before they opened. There were a couple people ahead of us. At this point we were worried that she might not even make it before it was her turn to be seen. Here's one of the problems with this place, you can’t make an appointment for a situation like this, I tried and was told they were booked out a couple of months. How does one make an appointment months in advance when they don’t know when will be the time their pet needs to be let go? I thought surely a couple days notice for them would be fine and they could work her in, but nope! They are very rigid with their practice of waiting to be seen. I went inside as soon as they opened the door to let them know how much distress my dog was in. I was told I would have to wait my turn. None of the staff asked the people ahead of us if they would be ok letting us go ahead of them. I asked if my dog died in the car while waiting our turn if they could help us get her out, at least they said yes to that. I went out with my family and my dying dog to wait our turn. She ended up losing control of her bowels in the van. She weighed close to 80 pounds and we had to try and scoop her out of the van without getting poop all over her. We hadn’t planned on this happening as she hadn’t had this happen before. We didn’t have anything to clean her off with but a few plastic bags. We ended up getting her out of the van and down in the gravel parking lot. We wish we could have moved her to the grass but she was too heavy and the more we moved her, the more distressed she became. She started drooling from the mouth and panting heavily. We waited out there in the wet gravel like this until our turn. The weather forecast was calling for severe storms and the sky was getting dark. We were so worried it would start storming outside while we waited. My poor girl was filthy from the wet gravel and poop. I had brushed her out and had her all clean and ready for the rainbow bridge only for her to get all dirty. Finally it was her turn to be seen. A staff member came out and asked if we would need a stretcher, thank God they had one because we surely needed one. We got her inside and it was a relief that it hadn’t stormed to make it even worse. We were asked if we wanted a paw print and we of course said yes. We said our goodbyes and then our sweet girl was gone. We had her cremated. I went out today to pick up her remains. Her paw print was a white mold of her paw print. Her print was dirty and had the gray gravel in it as well as some of her hair. This whole end of life experience was just difficult enough as it was, but to have the experience go the way it did at this place made everything even worse. Now when we look at the paw print, it will remind us not only of our sweet girl, but of the whole ordeal we had while waiting. My pet suffered unnecessarily because of rigid appointment scheduling. Have a heart and let an animal die with dignity. Please change your practices to allow for situations like this.