Doc, are you for real?

We love our pets, but medical aid for them? It’s a rip-off, writes Masood Boomgaard

AS a kid, I always wanted to own a pet. I’ve never actually owned a proper pet. By proper pet I mean a cat or a dog. I owned a hamster once, but hamsters are second-tier pets, sort of in the same category as rabbits and budgies: okay to peer at every now and again, but not terribly interesting animals.

These days chinchillas, lizards and exotic snakes are the fad with youngsters, but still not proper pets in my book. I like cats and dogs because they have personality and can actually do things.

I like a pet that can catch a ball or play fetch. It’s more dogs that do that sort of thing, but I once knew a Bengal cat that could outfetch just about any canine. On the other hand, I’ve never heard of anyone playing fetch with their Burmese python. Lazy bastards those pythons.

The reason why I never owned a pet other than the hamster – who died of cardiac arrest in his cage, after deciding to run on his wheel years after not doing so – was that my mother hated cats and believed that dogs would be a terrible inconvenience.

“Who is going to clean the s***?”, she would ask, every time I would raise the subject of getting a dog. When I assured her that I would scoop up the s*** daily (I was 12 and had time on my hands) she would then try to convince me that having a dog meant that you could never go on holiday again and that it would get sick a lot and cost a fortune in vet bills.

She liked to exaggerate, but it turned out in this case she wasn’t too far off from the truth. Pets in general are an expensive business, especially if you have one prone to medical emergencies. A little while back, I bought my 11-year-old niece a cockatiel for her birthday. Her mom, just like mine, didn’t want her to have a dog, so I figured a birdie would be far less hassle and low on maintenance. But, I was wrong.

We named the bird Malema because it had a big mouth. My niece loved Malema. Then one day at about 2am I got a call. My niece was frantic, apparently Malema was making a loud noise, and not the usual nonsensical chatter, he had been crying in pain for three hours.

So I drove over to Malema’s house, picked him and my niece up and drove to a 24-hour emergency vet.

After examining the bird, the vet told us Malema had something stuck up his backside. It turned out Malema was actually female and she was trying to lay an egg, and it was stuck halfway or something.

What happened next was that Malema needed to have a “procedure” done and would be required to stay over for two days. I was advised beforehand that the “treatment” was going to cost in the region of R6 000.

Since I had only paid R200 for the cockatiel on Gumtree, my inclination was to say, “six grand my arse, put the little bastard down”. But with my teary-eyed niece standing there, I couldn’t. instead, I took the bill like a man and maxed out the credit card.

Later, the vet decided to offer me some friendly advice.

“You should really look into some medical insurance,” he said.

At first I was a bit confused. “Medical aid? I’m sorted. I’m on medical aid already,” I replied. “Not for you, for Malema.” I thought he was joking. “Thanks for trying to cheer me up after that bill, but it still hurts,” I smiled. “I’m serious,” he said. “There are medical insurance plans for pets, you know. Will cover you if this sort of thing happens again.”

I don’t know what was more bizarre, the fact that you could medically insure your pets or that the same bird could have the same thing happen to it again.

So I did some reading and what I found blew my mind. While medical insurance for cats and dogs is most common, you can insure just about any pet these days. There’s even a whole category just dedicated to birds, avian medical insurance.

Then my mind started to run wild. Would my pet get discounted movie tickets or a reduced premium if he went to

the gym twice a week? Wow, a great business idea right there, a health club for your pets.

What about disability cover for your dog? I can see some schemers take advantage of that. While most owners would be teaching their dogs to sit, stand and roll over, fraudsters would be teaching their dogs to limp.

“Limp Coco, limp! Atta boy Coco.” That ought to fool the insurance people.

I can almost picture a day when people would be allowed to collect social grants on behalf of their pets. A guy would walk into the social services office and say, “My dog and I are both unemployed. Which form do I fill in?”

And why not, pets are people too, right? We give them human names such as Ruben and Arthur, dress them in humanesque clothes, take them on holiday, heck, they’re practically part of the family.

Now if I can just think of the next big con to make money off these silly pet owners…

@masoodboomgaard