to ask how much your biggest dog vet bill was?

[Friedbanana]

Paying £35 a month for pet insurance at the moment and it seems a waste as weve (very thankfully) never had to use it for our 3 year old golden retriever as she’s luckily in perfect health! i have decent savings now and im wondering if we should cancel and ill just pay bills out of my pocket if she ever needs it? it seems to go up by £7 a year despite no claims so if she lives to 12 i’ll have forked out £6300- do vet bills even go higher than that?
So just asking to help me to decided whether to keep the insurance/ maybe look to swap to cheaper!

£9k for two different surgeries on my staffy.

Oh and my friend has a Goldie, 18 months old. She's already claimed in excess of £1k.

£8000 and the Insurance only covered £4000.

Dog had to have his nail beds removed, common for 1 or 2 nails, but his was all his nails. That was over 2 operations. The alternative was to medicate a 60kg dog for life which would have been £100s a month.

My 10 year old lab just cost over £7000 for one issue! Over the years it's likely around £15,000

My old dog is about 11 now and I’ve claimed £100 month every month for his whole life, not including any other months when he has had bloods/xrays etc and it’s been more.
He has also had a tumour removal which was £1000.
He ate lots of chocolate at one point and I think that was £400.
My premium is £30/month.

My younger dogs all have insurance and I’ve had a few claims of £500 here and there but nothing huge.

DDog started showing signs of illness so we started at the vets....lots of hospital visits, anaesthetics, 3 x-rays, 1 MRI, many drugs, many overnight stays, 1 incorrect diagnosis then one confirmed diagnosis.....lost him with an £18k bill AFTER PetPlan paid the first £4k.

All happened within 12 weeks

We now have the highest ‘For Life’ policy available!

Boy Dalmatian - £300 a month for ongoing kidney medication

Old Girl Dalmatian - £700 when she ate a fatboy beanbag

Young girl Dalmatian - £4,750 when we’d had her 3 weeks. Erlichia, giardia, babesia, all at once. She got down to 12kg as an adult Dalmatian and the vets admitted they thought they’d lose her. She was rescued off death row at a kill shelter which they knew, so gave us 50% discount in the end

Lab: £3,000 after eating a dog bed. He didn’t make it.

Greyhound: £100. He’s cheap.

Your dog is 3, of course she’s not cost you anything yet;

We lost our rescue boy earlier this year. He was 5 years old when he died. His final total was £18,700 in the 4 years we had him. He developed an autoimmune condition and a joint problem, both hereditary when he was about 2. The biggest single bill was £2,700 but the second biggest was £2,400 and that occurred in the same month. His autoimmune condition sadly overwhelmed him eventually and it wasn’t fair to keep him going. I was paying £184 a month on his insurance by the end but it still worked out miles cheaper for us to have it than not.

Our other dog is 6, never been ill a day in his life and I pay £49 a month for his insurance and always always will.

Do not cancel your insurance. Your choice is to pay for treatment or kill your dog when the bills stack up and you can’t pay them anymore.

I stopped paying my dog's insurance when she got to about 11 and it was pretty obvious (due to a chronic health condition) that it would be unkind and unnecessary to put her through the risks of a general anaesthetic ever again (she had a laparotomy after she was 10 that I didn't think she would recover from as she retreated into shock for two days). The premiums were getting very expensive, by now and I decided I could afford visits for ongoing (palliative) prescriptions/tummy upsets. She was not very active so I thought her chances of breaking a limb were minimal. She managed another 2 years and I did not regret my decision. Obviously, I would never have stopped her insurance while she was younger and relatively fit and active - orthopaedic operations cost a lot and you never know what other conditions may pop up.

In the last month of his life, my little boy cost almost 4K just in one month

I'd never be without pet insurance

About £300 for a dislocated hip - Border Collie
About £200 for a course of anti-fungal treatment - GSD.
I don't have insurance, just the £15 per month pet plan that pays for regular check ups, jabs, flea & worm treatment etc.

Wise to keep it OP, you just never know what’s around the corner.

@ElephantsAlltheWayDown

My DD’s retired pony seems intent on paying off our vet’s mortgage - individually the bills aren’t that big, but they all add up pretty quickly. Especially as she seems to have a bit of a penchant for out of hours, emergency call outs 😂

Whyyyyy do horses always do this?? Only once has one of my horses had the decency to hurt themselves during the working day! 😂

I think she does it deliberately.

Eats her breakfast and tea perfectly fine Monday - Saturday 8am - 5pm. Gives herself choke and freaks the fuck out at 6:30pm on a Sunday night.

She’s 23 years old for fucks sake

I swear she spends a lot of her time coming up with new and interesting ways to hurt herself

My Greek rescue dog turned out to have a condition called leishmaniasis which is not covered by most insurances. When he got very sick and was first diagnosed the appointments, tests and medication was about 2000 pounds altogether. Now he has blood tests twice a year (£300/each), daily medication and he's on a special diet, so if nothing drastic happens it's about £1000/year. I do have an insurance for our other dog, happy to pay the £15/month for my own piece of mind.

£3,500 in about a fortnight when our springer had autoimmune meningitis. This was a lifelong condition that flared up a number of times over the next 12 years but was covered by her lifetime insurance.

More recently, nearly £2,000 over the course of a month for our cocker's pancreatitis - again, a lifelong condition that appeared from nowhere, required sedation for ultrasounds and x-rays and seven vet trips in a week, including two days as an in-patient for fluids.

Would never risk going without insurance, although I dread to think what our monthly bill will go up to next year.

My dog suddenly developed a brain tumour at just 6 years old. They couldn't remove it as it was right in the middle of his brain.

An MRI to diagnose this cost £1800. And over the course of the last few months of his life his various medications and treatments cost £6000.

Had we not had insurance we wouldn't have been able to afford to all of that, and his illness progressed quickly so we were racking up substantial bills each week.

It was worth every penny of animal insurance in my eyes. The vet told us that sometimes animals come in with a cancer diagnosis they can cure but they have to put the animal down as the owners don't have insurance and can't afford the bills.

Cheap insurance is cheap for a reason OP.

Bad insurance is as good as no insurance.

£6K. Insurance was definitely worth it!