Wed 19 Mar 2008
Pet animals have a degree of maintenance cost built in that their owners implicitly accept up front: food, shots, routine and incidental medical care. But now and then a pet gets seriously injured, or seriously ill, and the cost becomes a serious and likely emotionally wrenching question: how much is too much?
If you have pets, what’s your pet line? Have you crossed it before? Approached it? Had to make the practical decision despite the pain? Spent the money even if you didn’t have it? What happened?
And if you don’t have (or haven’t had) pets, is this something you’ve factored into your thinking about a bepetted (or pet-free) future?
Is your pet line a cumulative total (x dollars ever), or a per-incident limit (y dollars per incident, regardless of past history)?
(Humongous sympathy and good thoughts to the close friends who’ve inspired this.)
Posted by Josh Millard
Ugh, this is a difficult one. I do not have a number.
I spent $1000 on one of my dogs last fall because she had an infection. That was a complete no-brainer. Her life wasn’t on the line (yet; infections spread) and she is young, so there were none of the risks involved in spending a lot of money for the possibility of no reward. It went on my credit card and I’m still paying for it, but I didn’t blink. It had to be done.
And I spent $1000 one day a couple years ago on a battery of tests for one of my cats that was dead by the end of the day. The cat wasn’t even particularly close to me and I can’t see how I could have made any other decisions with regard to spending that money. Even knowing what I know now, I don’t for a second think, “We should have just skipped those tests; she wasn’t going to make it and I should have had her euthanized.” We just didn’t know and I couldn’t have lived with that decision.
My dogs are absolutely the light of my life. I’ve never known such goodness in a living thing. I don’t think I have an upper limit on what I’d spend on them as long as the risks were small. So far none of my pets have had anything big or bad happen to them; I have relatives and friends who have spent upwards of $5000 on their dogs in the past few months and I would have done the same thing. I have little interest in doing expensive, heroic deeds to extend a lousy life, though, so I don’t look forward to having to make those decisions. And I hope not to.
My limits are not cumulative; they’d be more per-incident. It’s the current health issue that interests me. What will THIS illness cost, and how does that weigh against the possible outcomes. If ever there is a pretty “sure thing,” I imagine I’ll pay any amount to achieve it. (While there is a risk of death in any surgery, I think I’d pay anything for relatively safe procedures that are highly likely to extend a good life.) What is “any amount?” Well, there is no procedure that costs $1,000,000. There isn’t even a procedure on the books that costs $100,000. So, you know, I guess I’d pay whatever the going rate is for any currently known veterinary procedure for a pet that isn’t pretty close to death anyway.
My cats are entering their early teens, so I imagine within in a few years I’ll start thinking that I might not spend as much on them (for big bad things). But I’ve had a cat for 10 years who just turned 11, and I’ll still go into debt for her, as we’ve been through a lot together.
I forgot to mention that in January I got pet health insurance for one of my dogs to test it out. (This was after spending all that money on the other dog.) I wrote a tremendously long, figure-laden blog post about that decision that I’ll not self-link to here. But I signed up for a maximum of $9,000 per year for her, thinking that that would be a nice chunk of money to save if anything catastrophic happened. (So far I’ve gotten $64 back from them in claims. Woot.)
This question is oddly poignant in light of this entry on the Customers_Suck LJ community.
I don’t have a pet. I do want to own a cat eventually - perhaps irresponsibly, as my only criteria for the desire is the fact that pictures of cats go a long way in cheering me up on a bad day. But I imagine that I would get very attached, very quickly, and even as a poor student I would do everything in my power to save him or her. But again, I don’t have a pet. Iguana’s post brings up a lot of good points that I shudder to even consider, but I guess loss is part of any relationship.
The cost I am willing to pay would probably be a certain percentage of my income- something where I could say to myself “oh, that’s just two weeks of work” or whatever. When I think about it that way, I would probably work about a max of 1 month for a pet.
The amount I would spend would also depend on the the returns- if the pet is likely to die soon, all I want to do is make it comfortable, not pay for radical 5th leg attaching surgery or something. If it’s something like Iguana’s infection example, I would be willing to pay more.
However, I don’t currently own a pet, so this is all based around an imaginary pet. In real life, emotion would definitely figure into the decision.
I had to put my Siberian Husky down when she went blind from diabetes. The blindness wasn’t the problem, but it was how we found out she was diabetic. The vet said that they didn’t even know if they could get her blood sugar regulated, but if they could it would cost upwards of $100 a day. We just couldn’t afford that.
$1k is well above my pet line, though I’m not sure where I’d draw it below that. I’d probably put the cap at a few hundred dollars, and I’d never, ever go into debt for a pet medical bill. Pets aren’t kids. Sorry.
That’s not to say that I didn’t cry like a baby when we had to put a cat down. As I remarked to cortex, there are some things worth crying over, but aren’t worth $1k.