Pet ownership should be for the wealthy

[spottybaghottyhag]

Pre emptying this by saying we are low income, get topped up by UC and my pet is eligible for PDSA treatment

My ddog 13 has been eating less than usual and not keen to go out as much, but otherwise bright and seemingly well. Made an appointment with the above vet. Due to his age they wanted to do x-ray/scan under sedation. Was very shocked to discover he has a tumour in his stomach. Vet basically said (over the phone) that as they are a charity hospital they cannot do anything further, the options are either a referral to a specialist vet to ascertain if it's cancer, or PTS. She said the referral + tests would be circa £1k, which wouldn't obviously include any actual treatment or surgical options.
Personally I don't want to explore other options regardless, he's 13, had a great life and I don't think major surgery or chemo on any elderly animal is fair. We are making sure he's still comfortable and will PTS when we feel he's not.

Onto the AIBU: it really made me feel that you should only get a pet if you can afford expensive vet bills. The PDSA are very limited in what they do (very understandably) and you cannot rely on them as a complete veterinary service. Insurance doesn't always pay out. Someone asked me will I get another dog when ddog goes and my answer was we cannot afford it. She felt I was being very unreasonable. Am I?

Insurance can get very expensive.
I always had the best for my two labs, but by the time they were 9 and 10 years old, I was paying £180 a month - and would have had to pay a percentage of any claim.
I cancelled and kept paying into a savings account. That covered Librella jabs for the eldest until he was pts at 12 years old, and has left 4.5k in the account for the youngest who has just turned 12.
She will have everything she needs for a happy life, but I would not put her through any invasive treatment, and would pts rather than sentence her to any lengthy recovery.

I figured out that when I had 2 dogs, I was spending almost £500 on them 😵

Yes it's a nuanced issue with many factors, a blanket 'wealthy' criteria is unfair and often unnecessary .. beyond a basic level of needs pets do not need you to be mega rich.. by the time they need complex surgeries its best to say goodbye even if you can afford it it's not always best to extend their life.

I can afford insurance on a relatively low income so I don't where you are getting someone would have to be wealthy to pay vet fees. My insurance ran out last month and need to sort out, my cat has already jumped out of a window and eaten pine needles in the couple of weeks he has not been insured !

I agree with this tbh.

What would these animals do in the wild? They'd die. So I'm not really sure we should be treating them.

You are on a low income OP, but telling others on low incomes that they shouldn't have a pet. Not exactly practicing what you preach!! and tbh I wouldn't put a 13 year old dog with cancer through invasive treatment which is very expensive, I would let them go peacefully

Monthly cost for my small dog is now well over £200, without any emergency fees. That includes insurance, but the excess is £199 without a 20% co-pay. If he gets a terminal illness he will not be treated other than palliative care and then put to sleep. It is not cheap. And I am amazed how much people charger for puppies these days, whether pure-bred or designer mongrel (mine was a rescue).

But not all pets are as expensive as dogs or cats. Most people could afford a hamster or similar.

I guess the answer to your question is based on if you define “wealthy” as “not poor”, or if you define “wealthy” to mean “rich-perhaps not super rich, but significantly above average”.

So no, I don’t think you need to be wealthy to own a pet, you just need to not be so poor you can’t afford pet health insurance or basic treatment they would need.

Sorry, "wealthy" was perhaps the wrong word (although I tend to think if someone can produce £4k for a bill then they are wealthy!) but I mean if you cannot afford potential treatment then you shouldn't get the pet. I've been lucky in that ddog has never had serious issues, he's needed antibiotics a few times and other visits to the vet for minor things. I assumed PDSA treated everything, albeit on a more budget scale. I wasn't aware that you'd need a special referral for things, and that they'd say the only other option is PTS. This is a living animal and it seems wrong to put it to sleep if it's young simply because you can't afford diagnostic tests. I always give a contribution at PDSA, but I notice that the majority of people don't.

I think the question is whether people really genuinely cannot afford a pet or if it is just not a priority.

We're low income but we make other sacrifices in order to be able to have pets, feed them well and insure them. People looking at the size of our dog(s) would probably think we must be wealthy. But we only have one car, which is old and tatty, we don't have expensive holidays or go for meals out, we don't drink, I don't get hair or nails done.
We work from home so there are no daycare or dog walker costs, we also groom our own dog.
So to me it's more about what your priorities are in life than about whether you are well off.

OP sorry about your dog's illness 💔

YANBU to feel that way but YABU to think that other people shouldn't have pets. How would we decide whose wealthy enough?

My cat is eligible for treatment from the PDSA, unfortunetly I didn't know this until after my cat had had a £800 emergency surgery. He was 10 at the time. I had to borrow around £600 for his surgery. We were skint for a few month whilst I paid the £600 back but it was well worth it,

No but plenty of vets are happy to do expensive diagnostics on elderly pets.

Bit OTT to describe as 'only for the wealthy' as long as you make financial provisions for your animals to receive the required vet treatment and regular flea, worming and vaccinations etc, you don't need to be rolling in money. But of course you should only commit to animals you can afford. Of course some animals live 20+ years and your situation could change, but PDSA should really be a last resort fallback rather than I'll get a few pets I can't afford to look after and expect PDSA will cover everything they need

OP I am sorry your dog is unwell.

You are very responsible to say you won't get another dog until you can afford it. If you need and have been awarded UC top up then you have no money to spare unless you were to take it from money allocated for looking after yourself and your children.

People need to be able to afford insurance and / or vet bills. It would seem very unfair to me to take on a young dog and not be able to get treatment for it if it had a nasty leg break or other accident requiring surgery etc.

Of course pets add great quality of life to many people, but that has to be weighed up.

And I agree - aggressive treatment for an elderly dog would not be kind. Well done for making the most difficult decisions for your much loved dog.

Back in the days when people were a bit more sensible about dogs you would put it down if it had cancer. But now it's become the norm to spend thousands of pounds keeping it alive. It would be much kinder to have it put down, but the pet industry focuses on persuading us to treat animals as if they were humans because this is the best way to get money out of us.

Said goodbye to my lovely cat @ 4 months ago at 19. Her insurance was £179 a month plus another £30 for the excess on her arthritis injection. Plus food she was costing us £300 a month that we paid gladly but realise so many people just wouldn't be able to afford this. Has put me off getting another cat as would want optimal care for its whole life but can guarantee we'd be in a position to pay large amounts in 10-15 years time. insurance premiums for elderly animals are astronomically expensive.

Pet ownership should be for those who can afford it but many people who aren’t wealthy will prioritise vet bills over things others would feel are more important, so you can’t have an arbitrary rule saying only wealthy people can own pets.

Insurance has skyrocketed for cats, personally if I got another kitten I would insure it for the first couple of years when it's cheap and then start saving the £179 a month into a savings account purely for any potential vet bills. Most treatments for cats aren't that expensive and when you're spending over £2k in premiums over the year and you still need to pay the excess of a few hundred, it generally would work out cheaper to pay it all yourself anyway and scrap the insurance. After a couple of years you'll have a good £5k in the account just incase

I agree that people should only have pets if they can afford to take care of them BUT vet costs are ridiculously high and climbing constantly because so many independent vet practices are being bought up by private equity and are used as a vehicle to create profit for investors. There are ongoing investigations into this and campaigns to legislate the cost of vet services - which I think is REALLY critical.

Vets who've worked for practices that have been taken over by corporations are coming out in their droves and basically saying that they've been ordered to essentially screw as much money as possible out of every single client. It happened to our local vets - who are now owned by a corporation called IVC Evidensia

I'd encourage anyone who owns a pet and uses vet services to look into who owns your vet practice, and as far as practicably possible, switch to an independently-owned and managed practice. These private equity bastards already have us by the balls on everything from healthcare to housing, transport, social care and utilities. It really is high time the buying public started taking back some major control over who we give our money to - and who we're making rich on the back of soaring costs and lessening value for money.

Apologies - rant and thread hi-jack over!

Change vet if you don’t trust them. Ours have always given sound advice taking into account age and quality of life.

Sorry about your dog Op. it’s hard to see them ill, and of course we cannot know how the illness is making them feel.

I am totally of the mind that I would not put my elderly dog(s) through difficult or invasive treatments and procedures, unless I was sure of the pay off.

When my old boy had health issues, in his last year of life, my first question to the vet was always ‘what difference will this procedure/ investigation make to his prognosis? He took along time to recover from sedations and so we put him through as few as possible.

But I do agree that pets can be an expensive luxury, and that you do need to understand that when taking on a puppy or indeed rescue.

Just to clarify, I'm not trying to police who owns a pet by an arbitrary number of their bank balance, but surely people should be made to think carefully about the average cost of a dog/cat per year before purchasing one.
I do believe there is a price on any animals head, I wouldn't be spending £20k on surgery for a dog/cat for example, or that the work of Supervet is necessarily in an animal's best interest. But if you consistently can't afford basic vaccinations or antibiotics then perhaps pet ownership is not for you?

I also need to add that my 'elderly' boy does not seem elderly at all, in the past new vets have queried if I know his actual age as apparently his teeth and other markers do not indicate he is even close to his actual age.

I agree. I don't have a dog and part of the reason for that is that I know there's a chance I would end up in huge debt if it needed treatment that wasn't covered by insurance.

Well, not necessarily wealthy but able to afford a decent insurance and any bills.

OP I think even if you had huge financial reserves, you're doing the right thing by your dog in terms of their quality of life - putting an elderly pet through gruelling medical care isn't loving.