The answer can be no

Sometimes an assessment ends without a letter

This is the least commercial page on our website and the one we would most like you to read. An operation that issues a letter to every single person who pays it is not conducting assessments. It is filling orders, and the paper it produces is worth precisely what that implies.

Why a hundred per cent approval rate is the warning sign

Consider what an assessment is for. A professional is working out whether a condition exists and what part the animal actually plays in it. If that enquiry is real, some proportion of the people who begin it will not meet the standard. That is not a flaw in the process; it is evidence there is a process.

So when a service advertises approval for everybody, or approval within minutes, it has told you something specific: no judgement is being exercised. The form is the product. Whatever arrives afterwards carries the authority of the form, which is none.

That matters most at the moment it is questioned. A document produced without assessment tends to collapse under any scrutiny at all, and the person holding it discovers this in front of the one audience they needed to convince.

We would rather decline you and say why. It costs us the sale and it is the only position consistent with the paperwork meaning anything for the people we do assess.

What actually happens if the answer is no

Five stages, and none of them involve silence.

Screening comes before payment A short set of questions sits in front of the whole process. It exists so that people unlikely to meet the standard find that out before any money changes hands rather than afterwards.
The consultation still happens If you proceed, you speak to the professional. The conversation is not a formality that gets cancelled once somebody senses the outcome may be unfavourable.
The decision is recorded with its reason A decline is entered against your file together with the basis for it. That reason is not a template; it is written by the person who made the determination.
You are told, and you can read it The outcome and its reasoning are available to you in your account. Nobody is left refreshing an inbox trying to work out whether anything happened.
Your money comes back A declined assessment is refunded. You paid for a professional opinion, you received one, and the opinion happening to be unfavourable is not something you should also be charged for.

The usual reasons an assessment ends this way

None of them are judgements about you as a person.

The threshold is not met The most common outcome. Difficulty, stress and unhappiness are real and still may not amount to what the standard requires. That finding says nothing about whether your feelings are genuine.
The animal is not connected to it A condition may be clearly present while the animal plays no part in managing it. Deeply loving a pet is not the same relationship, and a professional cannot record one as the other.
Another route fits better Occasionally the honest answer is that what you are describing calls for treatment, or for a different kind of support entirely, and saying so is more use to you than a letter.
Not enough to go on Where a consultation cannot be completed, or the account given is too thin to assess, the professional will not guess. That is a suspension rather than a refusal, and it can be resumed.
The request is outside the scope Some things people ask for are not clinical questions at all. Public access training, certification of an animal's behaviour and registration entries are none of them ours to give.
The account does not hold together Rare, and handled without accusation. Where what is described cannot be reconciled, the professional declines rather than proceeding on a basis they do not accept.

What you leave with

Your payment Returned to the card that made it. The refund path is built to be repeatable, so a failure partway through returns your money once rather than twice or never.
The reason in writing Not a code and not a form letter. You can read what the professional concluded and why, which is also what makes it possible to disagree with it.
Your records, still private A declined assessment does not become a marketing list. Nothing about the consultation is shared with anybody, and you can have the file erased on request like any other.
The whole Resource Center Fifty-one jurisdiction guides and the research tool stay open to you whether or not you were issued anything. They were never gated behind a purchase.
The option to return Circumstances change and a decline is not permanent. Where something material is different later, a fresh assessment is a fresh assessment.

If you disagree with the outcome

Say so, and say why. A professional judgement is not a verdict handed down from somewhere unreachable, and the reasoning is written down precisely so it can be examined. Where something was misunderstood or left out, that is worth raising.

You are also entirely free to seek an opinion elsewhere, including from somebody who already treats you. A clinician with a long-standing relationship to you knows things a single consultation cannot surface, and their view is not worth less than ours for having come from outside.

What we would ask you not to do is take the decline to one of the sites that approves everybody. The letter you get there will cost more than money at the point somebody examines it, and the position you end up in is worse than the one you started from.

Questions about declines

Will I be charged if I am declined?
No. A declined assessment is refunded to the card that paid for it. The screening step in front of the process exists to catch most of these before anybody pays at all.
Does a decline go on some kind of record?
Nothing is shared outside the practice, and there is no industry register of declined applicants for it to be shared with. Your file is subject to the same privacy programme as any other and can be erased on request.
Can I apply again later?
Yes. A decline reflects an assessment made at a point in time on the information available then. If your circumstances have genuinely changed, that is a new question and it gets a new answer.
What proportion of assessments end this way?
It moves, so quoting you a figure that felt accurate last quarter would be misleading. The honest answer is that it is well above zero, which is the only claim on this subject that actually tells you anything.

Why we will not approve in minutes

What an enquiry genuinely requires, and the price of buying haste once somebody examines the paper.

How clinicians join the network

What is checked before anybody assesses anyone, and what keeps being checked afterwards.

If we get something wrong

Corrections, refunds and how to escalate past the person who gave you the answer.

The Resource Center

Open to everybody, including people we turned down. Every jurisdiction covered, with sources named on each answer.