Salon ran an essay that resonated with me. It asks when the cost of a pet's treatment is too high. Often it is not a question of whether a pet can be saved -- it can be, for a price. But if an owner can't afford the treatment, the vet may save the animal, then allow someone else to adopt it. Talk about a guilt trip.
I wonder if in a down economy, more people tell the vet they will take a pass on spending $1,500 to save Fido.
The story includes this passage:
The Humane Society of the United States offers a guide called, "What
You Can Do If You're Having Trouble Affording Veterinary Care." Some of
their suggestions: "Consider taking on a part-time job or temping," and
"Pawn your stuff. TVs and VCRs can be replaced. Your pet can't."
And so it is that Americans spend billions of dollars a year on veterinary care. According to The New York Times, vet costs are rising by 9 percent a year, three times the rate of
inflation. Nearly every pet owner I know has spent hundreds of dollars
on a pet at some point. A co-worker tells me he racked up $1,200 in vet
bills in his dog's
first month home because he brought her in for every little thing,
including diarrhea, which he later found out could have been treated
with rice in her food rather than IV fluids. I'll never forget an
acquaintance of mine in college who -- ironically, I thought -- spent
thousands of his student loans on cancer surgery for his ferret the
same year he ate a dead rat as part of an art project.
And this:
In a
Slate piece
called "How to say no to your vet," Emily Yoffe described what she saw
as the two factors leading to the rise in veterinary care costs: "One
is the increasing acceptance of the notion that pets are family members
(thus the movement to change the word owner to guardian). The other is
the convergence of veterinary and human medicine -- pets can get chemotherapy, dialysis, organ transplants, hip replacement, and braces for their teeth."
i'm a committed pet lover. i've lived only 2 of...
