Letters to the Editor
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Face it, we're Americans
(or many of us are anyhow.) The people who think pet lovers are selfish for not sending each spare penny to charity, should look hard at their own budgets.
They shouldn't own a car or their own house or eat anything but rice and beans - that money could be going to charity... Many of us could be giving tens or hundreds of thousands per year to charity if we lived the lifestyle of a near-homeless person. That $1300 pales in comparison.
Loving pets usually makes them and us happy, and often makes children more compassionate adults. Most animal people I know are much more compassionate than those who focus on supposed human superiority, and they (the animal people) do more to help humans besides.
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Faulty premise
Your thesis seems to be that pets are not children; therefore, they do not warrant the same kind of extraordinary financial sacrifice to save their life, or health, that a child warrants.
However, if that is the case, then friends--who are not biologically related to us--cannot warrant those sacrifices, either.
To make your thesis work, your implicit premise is that pets are "things"--animals after all that, under the law, have the status of property.
On the other hand, if Ferdinand to you is not a "thing" but a "he"--a sentient creature that can give love and receive love--then your premise is faulty.
The source of your agitation is the conflict between your emotional principles, which tell you that Ferdinand is a "he," and your pocketbook. Your pocketbook votes for "it."
You simply can't have it both ways. If Ferdinand is an "it," then release him at the next big bill and be done. However, if Ferdinand is a "he," then accept that he is a member of your family, write the check, and let the money go.
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@ Phamelar
A lodged foreign body *is* an emergency, and the staff were correct to be disgusted at you for taking your dog away. Impactions have a high probability for tissue death of the intestines--a horrible, painful way for an animal to die. Yes, fortune smiled on you and your dog, but I would discourage anyone from making the same choice you did and removing the animal--in most cases the outcome would not have been so sunny, and the damage caused would have made what would have been an expensive but fairly uncomplicated surgery into an astonishingly expensive and not as likely to be successful one.
Boo on Salon for choosing that letter--with such bad, pseudo medical advice--as an editor's pick.
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Oh, you said it.
A few days after we brought our cat Roger and his adopted sister, Jackie, home from the shelter, my boyfriend and I had already accumulated a number of new stand-by names for them. Jackie, the tough little cautious mama, admittedly got fewer because we didn't see that much of her outside of the dark recesses of the house. Roger, however, soon became Destructo (for the quick work he made of our houseplants,) and The Orange Menace (for his tireless defiance of all the child-proof locks we had to put on our cabinets,) and Little Dogmonkeypigsnort (for reasons which should be obvious to anyone who's loved a cat.) We even considered buying him a little man-suit for when he stretches up on his back toes to "help" with dinner prep.
We love this cat - we love both our cats - and the days that Roger started slinking into faraway corners and forgoing dinner were some of the scariest since we had become fake parents. Does he have cancer? Did he swallow some of the broken glass from the bowl he knocked off the counter yesterday? Or worse, did he eat some of my sewing thread that I carelessly left inside an unlocked cabinet? As our (free) shelter vet was closed for the holiday weekend, we didn't hesitate to rush him to the swanky metro vet hospital. We needed answers.
At the well-appointed ER, we recieved prompt attention, sympathy and promises of the best veterinary care available. And after one $500 night of monitoring in the ICU, when we balked at the projected cost of a whole battery of diagnostics, we recieved more than a hint of judgemental scorn. Of course, we COULD take our febrile little buddy to the shelter vets, but they just don't have NEARLY the quality of resources, and there's just no guarantee... True, we thought, and what's a little more debt between our towering student loans.
So Roger recieved two more nights of care, IV fluids, antibiotics, X-Rays, sonograms, and biopsies (on my boyfriend's tearful go-ahead.) And at the end of three days, we recieved Roger back - shaved on the underside, and a little loopy from the kitty morphine - but apparently healthier. What we did not recieve, though, was answers - the tests had all returned inconclusive.
It wasn't until we took him for a friendly free check-up at the shelter, where the matronly vet chuckled at the animal hospital's inclination to "go a bit overboard," that the fog began to dissipate. In her estimation, Roger had suffered a touch of viral pancreatitis that probably cleared up on its own.
It was an expensive lesson to learn - that animals are probably a little more resilient than we give them credit for, and it doesn't hurt to try the simpler routes first.
Though, as I watch Roger3K (this nickname is sticking) devour his pill pockets (those hollow treats you use to trick your pet into eating his medication,) and, of course, spit out the pills, I wonder if I wouldn't do it all again.
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I love them but...
I paid 5 bucks for my wonderful mongrel hound dog. My second dog and my cats are all strays. I adore each and every one of them and if anything happened to them, it would be absolutely devastating. I spend thousands of dollars a year on their food and health maintenance. I’m not close to starving but I’m not rich and my husband’s not rich. If one of my pets became catastrophically ill, I would have them put to sleep. I would have no choice. I don’t own expensive things. My 9 year old car is going to have to last another 4 or 5 years because my husband and I can’t afford 2 car payments at the same time. Basically, if I had to choose between a fancy watch and the health of one of my pets, there would be no contest. I would gladly sacrifice luxuries for any one of them. But as someone early on stated, pawning all of my electronics would not come close to covering the $1300 expense the author describes. So should I not be allowed to have pets because I’m not rich enough to cover massive medical bills for them? Personally, I think my pampered little darlings are much better off with me than they would be starving on the streets.