We’re paying a high price for refusing to put our pets down
My mother, who has a bloodhound’s nose for incoming trouble, predicted the crisis in veterinary care more than a decade ago. Her local vet surgery had been bought up by a big American corporation, just as our elderly family cat started having seizures. The correct treatment would have been swift and merciful euthanasia. “But the new vet is refusing to put poor Teddy down,” raged my mother. “He uses this awful saccharine voice, and keeps saying he just wants to run one more test. But I can almost see the dollar signs spinning in his eye sockets.”
In 2013, just 10 per cent of vet practices were owned by large corporations. Today, that figure stands at 60 per cent. A small number of companies (among them Medivet, CVS, Pets at Home and the food company Mars) have established a nearoligopoly over the health of our pets. Vets’ bills have increased by more than 50 per cent over the same period, far outstripping general inflation. Now the Competition and Markets Authority is launching an investigation into whether this corporate takeover is squeezing out independent competitors and reducing consumer choice.
Well, duh. But the fault does not lie entirely with price-gouging corporations. (Mostly, but not entirely.) As vets have changed, so have their clients. Pet owners have become much more sentimental, anxious and anthropomorphic – and therefore easier to exploit.
The multi-billion dollar boom in pet-related consumer goods – nutritional supplements, luxury foods, designer collars, coats and booties – reflects the fact that many pets are now treated more like children than animals. Like children, they are kept under close and fearful supervision. Cats are confined indoors lest they should come to harm in the big bad world. (Never mind that incarcerating animals is harmful in itself ). Tiny dogs are carried around in slings, like newborn babies. Short of carrying them in the womb, it is hard to see how they could be more infantilised.
And, of course, a pet that is more like a child cannot be allowed to die. Even if they are in fact ancient. Ethicsfirst, a campaigning group of veterinary professionals and academics, has warned that too many pets are being subjected to painful, invasive and pointless medical treatments. Both owners and vets have become extremely reluctant to put animals down, even if it would save them suffering. So instead they are given heart bypasses, chemotherapy, prosthetic limbs, even stem cell therapy. Unlike human patients, pets can’t give their consent to these medical interventions; they can only endure them.
One of the most enviable aspects of a pet’s life used to be its ending. A short health crisis, followed by a lethal injection – often at home, in their own hairy bed. This is precisely the kind of “assisted dying” that campaigners want to introduce for terminally ill humans. “You wouldn’t treat a dog like this,” is the complaint of those dying slow and agonising deaths. But alas, that is no longer true. We now subject our dogs to much the same protracted, medicalised old age that we inflict on ourselves.
It costs tens of thousands of pounds to treat a cat with cancer, and roughly £200 to put it down. For the vet companies, human sentimentality is highly profitable. But this isn’t just about money. It’s about loving your pet selflessly, so that you know when to let go.