Reflections from a Hospice Vet: Supporting Pet Parents on Social Media
Our journey as a mobile End-of-Life veterinary practice has been one of learning, growth, and change.
When starting out, we were faced with the challenge of spreading the word that a mobile veterinary practice exclusively dedicated to end-of-life care for small animals even existed. Traditional marketing in a small community, such as a grand opening ceremony, open house or meet and greets, were not possible when our business does not have a brick and mortar location. We approached all the local vet clinics to share news of our practice and foster long-lasting partnerships. However, our social media presence was a very impactful medium in spreading awareness of our services and encouraging connection with our community in meaningful and personal ways, especially with our business being so unique.
Our latest challenge: our social media accounts have unfortunately been unpublished.
As a small business, when we are faced with obstacles, changes and surprises, we must stay flexible and reevaluate our pathway. We are rolling with the changes and adapting to grow and fulfill our compassionate mission.
When we first opened, there were not other mobile vet services providing exclusively End-of-Life Care in our community. Our social media accounts, Facebook and Instagram, were all about generating awareness that saying goodbye to a beloved companion animal can be experienced peacefully and privately from the comfort of home. We wanted pet families to know that alternative goodbye options are available.
Caring for your aging or terminally-ill pet is deeply emotional, complicated and often overwhelming. We wanted other pet lovers to know these feelings of anticipatory grief are common and wanted to validate and normalize all forms of pet loss grief and bereavement. 
To help pet families address the ultimate dilemma of “how will I know when it’s the right time to say goodbye?” we offer 60-90 minute Quality of Life Consultations. These consults are intentionally longer than your typical veterinary consultation to accommodate each individual’s complex circumstances. We used our social media account to spread awareness that this type of consultation is available with a Certified Hospice and Palliative Care Veterinarian, focusing on understanding pain and supported and informed decision-making and end-of-life preparations.
We wanted people to know that they were not alone during this difficult time.
Our social media presence helped acknowledge, normalize and validate pet families’ grief.
Sadly, pet loss is commonly dismissed with phrases such as “it was just a dog or only a cat” making it a form of disenfranchised grief. So often, the world of social media depicts people as happy, smiling, positive and successful. When in reality, our daily lives are full of ups and downs. With this in mind, we purposely crafted many of our social media posts towards the reality of pet loss and grief - that it is sad and hard. We included beautiful and/or sad quotes, shared pet memories, depictions of rainbows and other symbols of peaceful passing, and intentionally included real images of families grieving.
We created online tribute webpages in honour of the beautiful pets who had passed on, and also shared these publicly via Facebook and Instagram. With these tributes available for pet families to view and share, they became an outwardly visible reminder about the deep bonds and connections we feel for our furry companions. These tributes are another way for us to honour the bond, the life and the love shared with our companion animals, which is our mission.
So, what happened?
On June 2nd 2023, our Facebook page suddenly became unpublished and was put “on review.”
This meant no one could even find our FB page with over three years of carefully curated content representing the human-animal bond, end-of-life pet care, hospice and palliative vet care and grief support - it was all gone! 
We could no longer post any new content, nor comment or react to those pages we followed within our community. All our Facebook reviews that our wonderful clients took the time to share were gone. Over the next few weeks, and months, we submitted hundreds of appeals and requests for support, but sadly we did not receive any responses.
We spent countless hours researching the META database for solutions, reading forums about other business pages who had similar unpublishings and submitted numerous tickets for help from both the business account and from our own personal accounts. Instagram has been inconsistently allowing us access to our account. We spent most of the summer missing-in-action from the entire social media realm while we pondered what to do; having many discussions, weighing pros and cons, continually hoping that our page would suddenly be reviewed and republished.
After careful consideration and deliberation, we have opted to step away from having a Black Creek Mobile Vet (@petcomfortvet) Facebook and Instagram page. UPDATE: March 2024 - Instagram is working again!
Our carefully curated Facebook page @petcomfortvet is now obsolete :(
We are starting all over again with a NEW FACEBOOK PAGE (@homepetcomfortvet)!
We hope to reconnect with our lost followers and make some new connections too Supporting Pet Parents Outside of Socials
aka in real life
Fundraising for The Farley Foundation at the Stratford Farmer’s Market.
Laura and Dr. Erica at a Kitchener-Waterloo Stratford-Perth Humane Society Fundraising Event.
We are focusing on other community endeavors and engaging in local events, which aligns well with our goals and values. We will continue to fundraise for the Farley Foundation and The Humane Society, in addition to supporting the various local pet and animal rescues. We look forward to sponsoring local groups and clubs, and engaging in more public speaking events. We are also in regular contact with local area veterinary clinic practices. Here, we join in meaningful collaborative support for palliative or terminal pets and we also offer clinic staff lunch & learn opportunities aiming to enhance the end-of-life experience offered to pet families.
After being so involved in the social media world, interacting with our followers, sharing our journey and mission, and also our own personal pets (and human kids too), it has been disheartening to leave it behind. You may have noticed that we have opted to occasionally post and share supportive and/or informational graphics from our personal Facebook and Instagram accounts to make sure we are still known and “visible”. We truly enjoyed getting to know our pet families on a more personal level; having regular follower engagement and interactions via comments, reviews, referrals and photo sharing.
YOU helped validate OUR journey in knowing we are making a difference for the people and pets in our community.
Dr. Erica recently completed The Association for Pet Loss and Bereavement’s Pet Loss Grief Specialist Training Program. In the last few years, thankfully, there has been a lot of growth and attention in the realm of normalizing pet loss and grief. In addition to dedicated end-of-life veterinary practices, there are many excellent and compassionate pages and organizations that pet families can now follow and rely on when processing pet loss and grief.
As empaths, we strongly believe in offering accessible pet loss support and grief resources to all.
We recognize that these resources are not a one-size-fits-all solution, and that support comes in many forms. Whether someone responds best to reading articles or books, joining chat groups, talking with a counselor one-on-one or visiting an in-person grief group, we have curated a helpful hyperlinked handout with many compassionate options.
Our hyperlinked grief resource list may be downloaded here.
While we have stepped behind the scenes and are not actively engaging in regular social media, please know that we are still here to support you every step of the way. Should you or someone you know be struggling with end-of-life decision-making, pet loss grief, or just need some pre-planning resources, we are here to guide you. We are a team passionately dedicated to End-of-Life pet care, and feel so honoured to give back to our community through the world of compassionate support.
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