http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=111395&highlight=parvo
Well, don’t I just feel like a monster…
Anyway, I loved my dog. If I knew that she would fully recover with no illness or damage at all, I probably would have kept her. I’m still sorry that I couldn’t help her.
Maybe I am a monster, but I’d rather not get my car repossessed just so I could blow a bunch of money to extend the life of a dog that would only continue to suffer.
Probably lots. I know that if I hit a point where I couldn’t personally fund treatment, I could get a loan from the trusty Bank of Mom. I think we probably spent somewhere in the $1,000-2,000 range for one of our cats when I was a teenager.
Slightly off-topic: When my mother moved into her current residence, she discovered that there was really no place for the cats to sit and look outside (window ledges were too high/narrow). She had a bay window put into the living room, which we now semi-jokingly refer to as the $1,000 cat seat.
We would pay whatever it took to make our cats healthy, provided, as others have said, they could have a good quality of life. We have two and we love them dearly–we couldn’t live with ourselves if we let something happen to one of them because we were too cheap to spend the money. One of them has a heart problem that might turn out to be nothing to worry about but might end up being something serious. If it is serious, we’ll examine every option up to and including heart surgery (apparently there’s a vet in San Diego who does kitty heart surgery) to keep him healthy and happy.
They’re part of the family, and more valuable than almost anything else we could spend money on.
I’d probably want to write a check, and that’d just annoy the other petowners.
Sorry, Spanky.
I know of at least one case where a top musher from Alaska flew his lead dog to Ft. Collins, CO (first class, both the musher and the dog!) for treatment of bone cancer in it’s skull. US$10,000+ later, the dog had lost a large part of his skull, had acquired a doggie helmet to protect his brain from casual pokes and prods, and was sent back home with his musher (again, first class). One of my sisters was a senior at the Vet school, on oncolgy rotation when this happened.
Me personally? I’ve spent US$500 for surgery for a cat with a blown knee (cruciate ligaments and one collateral ligament. Picabo Street would’ve been proud!). Never thought twice about it.
I recently spent about six hundred dollars trying to save my dog’s life. He passed away, but hey, at least I tried. I would have paid any amount that I had. I could not sell my car nor my computer, but I would live on beans and rice for a year. He was a great dog.
I’ve spent hundreds on Smokes the ferret; two hundred-twenty just last week for an abcess. I have decided not to spend anymore on him because he’s already nine years old. Of course, I decided this BEFORE I spent the two-twenty last week! 
In the next month or so, I’ll be shelling out money to get vax and ops for my five new kits, plus mom(who will also be getting a healthy dose of Frontline). That ain’t gonna be pretty, especially seeing as how I’ll be out of a job next week.
Anyone want a calico kitten? They’re mighty cute. Mighty spoiled too!
My big cat (“big” as in size, he’s a housecat, not a tiger, but damn he’s big for a cat!) set a new record for me in October: $1600. Two Emergency Clinic visits and then surgery to correct the issue.
He is SO MUCH BETTER it’s like having a kitten again. He’s back to his doggy behaviour (my big cat acts like a dog: fetches a ball, does tricks, flushes the toilet, and other assorted dog stuff). He’s incredibly affectionate again, is learning new tricks and we’re teaching him to play the tom-toms (he likes to beat on boxes like drums, so we figured what the hell, let’s get him a tom-tom, see what happens.)
His expensive surgery has made a tremendously positive impact on his life and was definitely worth every penny. He’s also expected to be around for several more years to come, so I have no regrets over the money spent.
Silver Fire, I read your thread, and you are not a monster! I think we all agree spending gobs of money on a hopeless situation does not make you a better person or pet owner.
I had a puppy who, to my shame forever, got out of the yard with my other, older dog. She was 6 months old and 4 days post-spaying. The older dog came home and little dog didn’t. I searched about a 4-mile radius of the house all day, and in the afternoon, finally found her behind the neighborhood elementary school. I called her name, and she ran the other way, right into a very busy highway. I did not see the impact, but I heard it. My little darling was there lying in the road, looking at me to help her. An angel of mercy drove me and puppy to the emergency vet (it was a Sunday). There was no question that I would try to make her better, even though it looked pretty hopeless. She stayed over at the emergency vets until Monday morning, when she was still paralyzed. She had sustained a blow to the head, too, and one eye was rolled back in her head. I’m still crying as I write this and it happened last November. We took her to my regular vet but there was no helping my poor baby and we had her put to sleep. I’m still paying off the credit card for the emergency vet bill, it was like $500. I would have paid almost anything if only she could have been made whole again. Or if only I would have taught her to come when called. Or if only I had fixed the fence so they couldn’t dig under.
After my cat got hit by a car last year I payed over $1200 in surgeries and such.
He had to be put to sleep anyway 
You know, I love my cats, I do, but I would never spend more than 100 on them, 200 at the most. I was raised to understand that pets die. That’s it. And when they die, you save another one from the shelter, or from getting shot, or from starving to death. You give them a good home, and make sure they never suffer from illness or injury, but you just don’t spend big bucks on them when the money could be better spent on crazy things like rent and utilities.
I am more on Peperlandgirl’s wave lengh here. The way I look at it, spending gobs nad gobs of money on a pet is a personal indulgance, not a moral imperitive: i.e., you do it for yourself, not because there is anything morally wrong with going with inexpensive pain-free euthanasia, provided you go rescue another animal. Now then, I am not about to bash anyone else’s personal indulgances: we’ve all spent crazy amounts of money on things for ourselves instead of using that money to feed the homeless. But seeing as millions (tens of millions?) of animals are killed every year, I don’t think that there is anything morally wrong with giving life to one of them instead of giving life to the animal that is sick: just because you love Sparky and Sparky loves you dosen’t mean that he is more entitled to life than no-name puppy at the pound.
Now then, one of the main reasons I have no pets is because I have no income and could not commit to providing them with good care. And maybe someday when I have an income I’ll plop down $1000 for chemo. But I will think of it as something I am doing because it makes me feel good, not because it would be morally wrong not to.
I agree, MandaJO. Up to a point. For me, that is, morally, it would be wrong **not **to spend money up to an unspecified amount that I would be comfortable with on an animal I had committed to caring for, given the OP’s reasonable chance of success. But I also understand that it’s all about my morals and feelings, not the animal’s.
<B>pepperlandgirl</b> - I think we all understnad that pets die. However, I think many of us feel that it’s our obligation, having taken them in, to provide the best we can for our pets. After all, even a routine “he’s got an infected scratch” visit will cost about $70 from my vet, including meds. So if my dog needed something more would I not do it? After all, animals aren’t like kleenex, to have one replace another without thought. And if you take an animal in you tacitly agree to provide routine care, vaccines, etc. In many case, an ounce of prevention is worth several hundred dollars of cure.
I’m not saying that you, or anyone else who can’t afford extreme care, are a bad person. I am saying that maybe you have a different level of attachment or commitment to your animals.
StG
It costs $120 to get each of my dogs teeth cleaned yearly and that’s during February’s discount dental month. I can’t and won’t limit my love for them.
Depends on the pet.
My fish: $20-$30 in treatments and water test kits. Not to mention all the effort in changing water, isolating fish, etc.
My snake: I recently spent $150 for Henry to have antibiotics and surgery to remove a tumor. I was near the max I had determined for him: $200 (which is double his cost).
My birds (classroom pets only): $20-$30. As adopted strays, I would and have given them the equivalent of OTC treatments. I’m finding new homes for them now, where hopefully they’ll get the attention and devotion they really deserve.
My cats: Very tough question. I would spend $1,000 for either without pause. Above and beyond that, it depends on what benefit the treatment would have. For example–a shattered leg that costs $2,000 to repair? Sure. A surgery for a disease that has no better than a 50-50 shot at saving the cat? Maybe. If I were to set an absolute limit, $3,000 is the most I can fathom for now–but like others have said, I would spend as much as I could afford.
Ruffian - What kind of birds do you have? I’ve never kept birds. All of my dogs and 1 cat are rescues. (Did I ever tell you that I have an Airedale named Ruffian?) My horse I bought as a yearling and raised and trained myself. I lost my old mare to cancer after trying to keep her alive long enough to have her foal. I lost them both.
StG
What I don’t understand is why your moral obligation is stronger to your pet than it is to the healthy animals they are putting down at the pound. I agree that it is your obligation to keep anything you care for out of pain, and vaccinations are a social obligation as they keep all animals healthier, but the motive for paying large amounts of money to save the life of your animal is to keep yourself from hurting, not to reduce the total amount of senseless animal death in the world.
Strictly speaking ,I suspect that the morally rihgt thing to do is to put your animal down and rescue two or more animals wiht the money saved: this is morally right in the same way that if you had to choose between the death of one of your children or two of someone else’s children, one ought to chose to save the two strangers. However, if faced with that choice I would save my own kid. But I would wrestle with guilt feelings. I would also wrestle with guilt feelings if I spent an extraordinary amount of money (say, my annual income) on an animal.
This is a bit of a hot button issue for me because I am sensitve to the way we are a culture that simutainously loves animals, and has to put down millions of animals a year. People may know about it intellectually, but never emotionally: I wish that they would put pictures of the living kittens and puppies they put down in the paper and on the news the day after they are euthanized, with the tag line: “Killed yesterday”.
Manda JO - Almost all my animals are rescues (see above). They are all spayed or neutered. I donate money to my local shelters. I have saved other animals that I don’t own. However, my animals ARE more important to me than the dogs at the pound. That’s only natural. And an animal is going to die. Why should it be mine? I understand that there are children dying in Africa. Should I put all my animals down and give the $150/month I spend on animal expenses to human charities? Would that drop in the bucket change things? Because ultimately I feel that humans are more valuable than animals. But I don’t feel we can solve all the problems of the world. We can’t even solve the problems in our communities. And spending an amount that I can afford to keep my animals healthy and safe isn’t a sin.
StG
I think it’s more reasonable to let a suffering animal die gently than prolong it’s death with expensive medical treatment. To me, it doesn’t make sense to spend thousands of dollars on an ill animal that will die anyway when I can let it go, and spend money I can afford on saving a healthy pet from the shelter.
I guess it’s because when I grew up, I lived on a farm, and dogs were kinda like kleenex. One would die, so we would save another one. We kept a constant of 6 dogs. I loved every single dog I ever owned very much, and wept–no, went into complete hysterics and it took hours for the sobs to finally stop-- when each one died due to whatever reason, but at the end of the day, they were just dogs and there are thousands, millions, more out there.
No, it isn’t. Iagree completely. But it also isn’t a moral obligation. Like 99% of our expenditures, it’s a luxury. But it dosen’t indicate that someone who chose otherwise is less attached to their pets, or that they haven’t fufilled their commitment.
And I would argue that once it passes a certain amount, it can be a sin: for example, if someone chose pet care over child support payments, or over helping a friend who was the victim of some terrible tragedy and about to be evicted, or (this is more grey) over paying for their child’s education. People in positions like that have to make a very hard choice, and I don’t think it is right to claim that the decision to not empty out Junior’s college fund is proof that they are “less committed” or “less attached”, which seem to me to just be nice ways of saying “love their animals less”.