There are plenty of people with “Please save our pets” stickers in their windows, with names & breeds so the firefighters can make sure Fluffy and Sarge get out. I have no idea if firefighters will actually run into a burning building to get the pets - I’m dreading the first news story of “Firefighter, father of 5, killed attempting to rescue dog.”
This is the only thing that I don’t like about the vets who take care of the Wonder Beagle and the three little hairy monster cats. Overall, I love this clinic because the vets (it’s a walk-in and your pet is seen by whoever’s available) handle the animals well and talk to me like I’m not a moron. But sometimes, I feel like I really have to convince these guys that my pet’s interests are best served by palliation or euthanasia, not the pursuit of a cure.
I really had a hard with this time last year when the Old Lady Cat was getting ready to die. She was 19 and suffering from the various things that can go wrong with a cat that old simply by virtue of having lived that long. The last thing she needed was to be put on a diet of prescription food that she didn’t like and to be chased down twice a day to be given a pill for her failing kidneys. But that’s what the vet offered. The kind thing to do would have been to have someone come to the house, get the cat good and comfortable, and put her to sleep at home. Couldn’t sell them on it. At least we got the vet to agree that the cat was better off dying of kidney failure over a licked-clean plate of tasty food than of starvation over a full plate of prescription food. And die she did - cwPartner found her mostly gone one morning in the dining room, where she’d collapsed overnight. She expired at the vet’s office, waiting to be put down there. It seems like an unfair end for an sweet cat who gave us a lot and never asked for anything other than comfort in return.
You know, I love my cats to death, and I personally would be willing to spend way more than $200 to save either of them, but I’m not willing to bankrupt myself for them. I think that’s pretty reasonable.
I also probably, if my house was on fire, would run around looking for them until it was absolutely no longer an option, but I sure as hell wouldn’t expect anyone *else *to risk their lives to save my cats.
There’s responsible pet ownership, and there’s above-and-beyond pet ownership, and then there’s just fucking crazy.
Animal medicine has made some huge advances and more things are easily treatable now days. I get attached to my pets. For myself, if my pet is ill and requires treatment, and I have the money, my pet is getting treated. I can’t say that I have an upper spending limit. I depends on how much $$ I have at the time, and the situation (quality of life, etc.). I suspect that my limit may be higher than other folks, even though I’m not rich.
To turn my back on a living, feeling, creatures pain (especially one I took on and promised to care for) and spend the money on new shoes, furniture or other “stuff” seems rather inhumane and cruel. My priorities are:
- Me
- My animals
- Stuff
I’m sure it has happened that a firefighter (and parent) has died saving someone’s “stuff”, but you probably won’t see that headline.
Well, no. Firefighters die attempting to put out fires, which is different from “saving stuff”. No firefighter is ever going to run back into your house to save your plasma tv.
Well, and they’re not going to run back in specifically after the dog if it’s very dicey, either. Hell, after a certain point they’re not going to run back in after you. That’s not what the stickers are for. The stickers are so that firefighters know the animals are there and can try to get them out if it’s safe to do so, but also so they don’t waste time looking for more critters than there actually are.
Depends on where you live, some places offer discounted shot clinics for pets, if that is all you want.
The main reason to bring the pet to the vet once a year is so that the animal can get a physical exam, check up, and if there is something wrong, to catch it before it progresses (heart murmurs, lameness things, lumps and bumps, parasites, for example). It gives the vet a baseline on how the animal is doing, and a chance for the owner to express concerns or ask about things related to the animal.
Just like, you know, humans are supposed to do (but not everyone follows it).
What the hell? I wasn’t saying you should put an animal down immediately, but from what I’ve seen, chemo isn’t all that fun and games, and I suppose after seeing my cat Misty die from cancer, I’m a wee biased. We kept her as comfortable as long as we could, but we had to have her put to sleep. She WAS in pain, and we could see it. We gave her medicine, kept her comfortable and secure, but it was only a matter of time.
Money isn’t the object. Last year, we spent $400 on Piper-Grace when she got sick after eating plastic flowers. (She has a tendency towards pica.) Four hundred on a constipated cat. Money wasn’t the point.
We’ve spent plenty of money and time to prolong our animals’ lives, as long as it keeps them happy and pain-free. I just don’t want anything that would pro-long pain. (And I HAVE seen people do this, not wanting to let go)
Last year, my cousins had to get major surgery for their dachsund, Guinness, after he ate part of a towel and ended up getting it stuck in his intestines.
The level of devotion to pets nowadays falls on a spectrum. The median level of care has risen over the last 15 years but not as much as you would expect from some of the extreme examples. I’m talking doggie yoga, “fur kids”, etc. It’s not so much that these people weren’t out there before, but more a function of there being a highly lucrative market that the pet care industry is really starting to tap into. It’s really just another way for some folks to display their wealth. Dogs for some people are little more than a fashion accessory or status symbol. I’m sure for the vast majority it is completely sincere but there are some who are just keeping up with the Jonses. There were crazy cat ladies 30 years ago but at that time nobody offered kitty shiatsu massage so they weren’t as visible.
I do think you are seeing more people today who take great joy in their pets and incorporate them more into their daily lives. I see more people than ever enrolling in agility, flyball or other dog activities. To me this isn’t really excessive so much as a desire to do something fun with your dog. I think some people really enjoy the connection they have with their pets. Unless you’ve had “that dog” it can be hard to understand. It’s easy to look at this attitude and think that a person is substituting for a child or some form of human contact but I don’t think that is usually the case. Most of the folks I meet are pretty down to earth about their dog being a dog. It’s an altogether different relationship then what you can experience with a person and has its own set of challenges and rewards. To me its fascinating to interact with a different species. For all the times I’ve struggled to understand why my dog is behaving in a certain way I can think of a time when my dog was desperately trying to figure out what the hell I wanted. The fact that we can pull it off occasionally is part of the appeal for me.
I guess I would just caution anyone trying to assign motives to what they consider excessive. I think its easy to misinterpret something as wacky that is actually pretty natural or useful. I know a dog who gets hydrotherapy. It helps with a joint condition and makes him overall a lot more comfortable. If the hydrotherapy is worth it to the couple paying for the treatment then I don’t think you can just write them off as nutcases. I’m sure we all spend money on interests that others would find unusual.
Doggy daycare is another good example. It can actually be very helpful in socializing a dog and overcoming some fear and anxiety issues. A dog really needs to be around other dogs to learn all their doggy manners. It can be tough for some people to find a way to expose their dog to a bunch of other dogs consistently. To be able to send them off as little as once a week to run with essentially the same pack mates can help with problems you just can’t train away. This can lead to a more secure dog who is better behaved in the home and more resilient to surprises and distractions. So again you have a situation where on the outside this might look like a needless indulgence but it actually has a tangible benefit.
As far as the companion animal vs. pet thing goes, while I’m sure there are people out there with this attitude, I think it is relatively rare. I talk to around a hundred people a week about their dogs and I have never once had someone object to the word pet.
Adoption fees are high but usually not as high as a round of vaccinations and a spay or neuter. The application process and fees are partially meant to discourage casual adoptions. Shelters can have a pretty high rate of recidivism (can’t think of a better term here) so they try to strike a balance. It should be pretty easy to adopt but not too easy. Once the resources have been expended to get an animal into adoptable condition they don’t want to see it come back. Admittedly there are some groups that go way too far with this but I think it’s in a shelters best interest to put up a couple of hoops to jump through. Almost none will allow a same day adoption anymore and this surprises a lot of people.
Blah, blah, blah… I’ll quit now. I could go on and on.
If you think that chemo is never appropriate, and that it can’t reduce symptoms and relieve pain from certain types of cancer, then yes, you’re biased. And also incorrect.
I’ve seen animals go into a few months of complete remission from lymphoma because of chemotherapy. No pain, no other side effects, just blood draws and quick exams every couple weeks. Was it cruel of the owners to do that? No. Absolutely not. Those pets were completely happy and comfortable, and when the cancer came back, the owners were ready to let them go before they got to the point of needing pain medications. Prolonging their suffering, my big fat ass.
Closer to home, when the old gal my parents had had since I was teenager developed a big mass on her leg, we opted for surgery. It was a fairly major surgery, and her recovery was a couple of weeks, and just being there for the operation was pretty stressful on her. But it bought her 4 years of pottering around the workshop with Dad and digging up Mom’s garden. She was happy, and so were we. And if the surgery had only bought her a few months, those few months would have been worth the stress of the surgery and recovery time. For all of us.
I’m sorry, but I was under the impression that chemo therapy CAN be rough. (If it’s not, I appologize) IF excess care IS painful, then yes, I’m against it. I have known people who refused to let their pets go, letting them hang on when they should have let them go peacefully. (And people who do THAT piss me off)
So if you can help your pet survive with surgery and the like - that’s wonderful. (We certainly did so with Noel – lord knows how many surgeries she had!) But in Misty’s case, the vet told us it was fatal – any treatment would only give us a few months, at most, and even that wasn’t guaranteed. So we gave her a few weeks with some pain pills, kept her comfortable and snuggly, and when it got to be too painful for her, we had her put to sleep. And now she’s buried in the backyard along with our other pets from years ago. (My childhood cat and dog, Fluffy and Lassie, our kitten Tess, and now Noel).
I’m sorry, I guess I’m just using MY own experience to judge, and I shouldn’t do that. (And I guess I’m still bitter because Misty was only 8 years old)
We chose chemo for our cat with small cell lymphoma. We are so close to the UW vet school I figured we should give it a try. UW has one of the top veterinary oncology departments in the country. I had a lot of misconceptions going in and was really reluctant to do it but it has worked out fabulously. One of the first things we learned is that most dogs and cats have significantly fewer side effects from the chemo drugs than people do. Our girl would have about 12 hours of lethargy about 24 hours after her infusions but other than that she was fine. She lost some fur but no pain or loss of appetite. In fact the masses in her neck would visibly shrink over a day or two which made he a lot more comfortable. It was a rollercoaster for a while and at one point she was pretty ill but still eating and moving around OK. The doc told us that we had tried all the usual drugs and the only one left was Vinblastine. He said it wasn’t used often in cats so there wasn’t a lot of data on it’s effectiveness but we could try it if we wanted to. We figured we would give it a go and bang… complete remission. She was diagnosed in the summer of 2007 and has been in remission since spring of 2008. Today you wouldn’t know anything is wrong with her. She gets an infusion once a month and we might end that in the next 90 days or so. A really remarkable outcome. They call her Clover the Vinblastine wonder cat.
I won’t tell you how much we spent or you really will think I’m crazy. Needless to say it was worth it for us. Even if she hadn’t gone into remission on the Vinblastine we would have significantly improved her quality of life for 6 months or so. I am definitely convinced that she suffered less from the effects of the chemo than she would have if we had done palliative care with something like prednisone.
Clover the “Vinblastine wonder cat” on the left and William Shatner: The Cat (we call him Billy) on the right.
Chemo is generally nothing like as hard on pets as it is humans, and even in human medicine they use it as a form of pain control. My grandpa is on palliative chemo right now, as a matter of fact. The chemo has probably only bought him a few extra months, but he’s much more comfortable than any of us expected him to be at this point. The day of and night after is fairly rough on him, but not as rough as constant pain and the dopiness that comes from painkillers would be.
And that fits with what I see in animal chemo patients–they feel lousy during the day after their injection, but every week when they’re dropped off they visibly feel better than they did the week before. Even the ones whose cancers aren’t responding typically stay brighter and less painful longer than the ones whose owners opt for keeping them comfortable for as long as possible.
Granted, that’s with a highly responsive form of cancer. I’ve never actually seen anybody pursue chemo on the less chemo-responsive forms, because the odds of buying any real length of quality time are so low. And a few months is a real length of quality time, especially in the lifespan of a pet. Hell, it’s a real length of quality time in the lifespan of an over 80-year-old man.
But you just can’t use one case to generalize anything about cancer, because no two cancers are created the same. Some can be completely cured with surgery, others it’s useless. Some are highly responsive to chemo, others don’t respond at all. How aggressive to be is a complicated decision that encompasses the pet’s age and other general health, the owner’s finances, the specifics of the tumors(s) and the likelihood of a given treatment helping, and a lot of other factors.
I’m sorry for singling you out, Guin. CrazyCatLady has said what I’ve wanted to say and meant. Too many times animals are put down due to some misconceptions. In this board, where misconceptions are torn down, this would be a place to mention those.
Other times, and I didn’t want to imply you did, apologies for that, people use the same misconceptions when they’re really talking about money. You have to admit, people do that all the time, not just with their pets. If they’re more upfront and say it is about that, it bothers me a lot less than continuing mentioning things that are not true (and sometimes refusing to listen to anything to the contrary).
Please remember I did put sometimes, some drugs, and some types of cancers. Different ones have different behaviors, and whereas I would be all for it to spend a lot of money treating one type in my dog, I’d think it twice before undergoing aggressive therapy in others.
Looks like I’m going to have to put my money where my mouth was back in post #22. I just spoke to the vet, who tells me that the Wonder Beagle has lymphoma. Probably very early stages, so we have a couple of options, but they’re all variations on “buying time.” Crap. Apologies for the hijack.
Yes, and I’m sorry for generalizing. In Misty’s case, it was throat cancer, and from what the vet told us, it would have required radical surgery – removal of the tumor? (I’m speaking from memory here, so bear with me). All I know is that it was terminal. 
It wasn’t money so much, like I cited above with Piper Grace. And Noel was always at the vet’s. She had a heart murmur all her life, she had a congenital oral condition (I can’t remember what it was exactly – it was almost like her gums were allergic to her teeh?) and all of her teeth had to be removed.
THEN, last year, apparently she must have gotten a bite of some sort on her tail, started biting it, no matter how we tried to stop her, kept it bandaged, followed the vet’s advice – and it had to be amputated. (Either that or keep her in a permanent collar, but it was starting to get infected, badly.) Stupid cat. (It didn’t seem to bother her though – she just had this little bunny-like tail.) And in her last few months we gave her antacids when her stomach was constantly bothering her.