Dogs will break your heart and leave you bankrupt, but they’re worth every penny
Vets are being accused of ripping off pet owners, but you can’t put a price on the love of a dog, says Andy Blackmore
Vets have come under fire recently with accusations of price gouging. Having received over 56,000 complaints, the Competition and Markets Authority is now launching a formal investigation into the veterinary industry, and has expressed “multiple concerns” about pet owners being paying over the odds and being given inadequate information about medical treatments.
Now anyone who’s loved a pet will tell you that looking after them is expensive. But the value you place on them depends on your personal philosophy and the lessons learnt along life’s journey; so, let me tell you a tale of three dogs and a couple of vets.
Jack, our utterly irrepressible rescue Jack Russell, who was treated by Noel Fitzpatrick, star of TV’s The bionic Vet, for epilepsy and needed medication every twelve hours. Chips, our exuberant rescue Jack Russell/Corgi cross was the epitome of joie de vivre. At just eight years old he was diagnosed with an inoperable tumour on his brain stem. There followed trips to the Royal Veterinary College, chemotherapy, then the inevitable.
Finally there was Lucy, my precious Pit Bull, rescued half-dead from a South London pub. She was bred to fight, yet lived out her dotage oblivious to her arthritis thanks to an eight-hourly medication regimen. Her passing at 15-years-old blindsided me by being, in death’s eternal dichotomy, both expected and totally unexpected.
They all broke my heart, but they also broke the bank. You see, for as long as I’ve had dogs in my life, I’ve had vets too. For the last twenty-one years, they have provided a level of health care that would be the envy of most humans (Royal family excepted), delivered with a dignity and compassion money can’t buy, but it has come at no small cost.
“Jack, Chips and Lucy, my holy trinity, three became two. And then you were the ONE. Finally; that day came. Then there were none”. In case you are wondering, that is an extract from a tribute I delivered to Lucy at her funeral just a month ago. Now if you think there is anything strange about some auld idiot composing a eulogy to a dog, let alone holding a funeral for one, then you don’t know me or how much I loved those dogs.
Life is so much easier to understand in retrospect, but there are some things you shouldn’t analyse in reverse – vets bills in particular. If you look at your pets through the same lens as an accountant, you risk seeing the cost of everything and the value of nothing. It’s not just the money. Our pets are priceless.
If you want to make pet ownership an exercise in double-entry bookkeeping be my guest, it’s not a calculation I’ve ever considered. Absentmindedly, I may have done back-of-the-fag-packet calculations on what the dogs have cost in the last two decades, but I gave up when I realised it would have been cheaper to buy and run a vintage Ferrari, keep a string of polo ponies and feed a humongous drug habit.
However, even in considering the cost, you may lose sight of the benefits. It is almost impossible to convey the silence one experiences on returning to a mute house that no longer feels like a home. Once, it held dogs close to its heart, but after 21 years of beating, that subsequent stillness is crushing, like being trapped in a silent car crash.
Honestly, I don’t regret a second or begrudge a penny. On the whole, in my experience, vets are not the money-grabbing monopolists. But perhaps the same can’t be said of the greedy financial institutions that own most of them.
Bloody dogs; they bankrupt you and then break your heart. But whose fault is it but our own? Vets may have us over a barrel, but if the price of decent animal healthcare is the collateral damage of exploitation, we have no choice but to pay, for the alternative is too horrible to imagine.
Andy Blackmore is picture editor at City PM