A community Facebook post requesting recommendations for “a cost-efficient vet who provides good care without taking advantage of customers” has produced, in under 24 hours, 247 individual recommendations spanning every veterinary practice within an 80-kilometre radius, The Corn’s research department reports.

The recommendations are characterized chiefly by their mutual incompatibility. Three clinics emerged as the leading recommendations, each appearing approximately equally often in the thread, each described in alternating comments as “the best in the area” and “absolute highway robbery.” One clinic was described, by two different residents within the same minute, as both “so kind and gentle with my dogs” and “would not let me hold my cat during the visit and charged me for the visit anyway.”

A second clinic, located in a neighbouring township, was praised by sixteen residents and characterized by another fourteen as “you may as well just hand them the money and skip the dog.” A third clinic, location undisclosed, was described as “fantastic” and also as “the one I drove past on principle.”

The original poster, asked for comment, said she was “going to think about it” and had not, as of press time, selected a clinic.

“I have been going to the same vet for years,” she clarified, “but I want to see if there is a better one.”

Asked whether she had been dissatisfied with her existing vet, she said no, but that she had heard “there may be a new one” somewhere in town, possibly, and wanted to confirm before committing one way or the other.

Veterinary professionals contacted by The Corn described the regional ecosystem of community-board vet recommendations as “structurally unsolvable.” The same clinic, one explained, will be described as overpriced by a customer who paid $80 and as a bargain by a customer who paid $400 at a different clinic the same week. Pricing transparency, when offered, is interpreted alternately as “good” and as “obviously a trick.”

Among the 247 responses to the original post, several stood out:

• A resident who recommended a vet, then in the same comment alleged that the recommended vet had once been rude to her sister
• A resident who, in lieu of a recommendation, posted only the words “GOOD LUCK”
• A resident who appeared to threaten violence against a competing clinic, in passing
• One marriage proposal, directed not at the poster but at the poster’s dog, based on a photograph from a previous post

The thread remained active at press time. The Corn will publish a follow-up if the original poster ever selects a vet, which appears unlikely.