Rob Blackhurst

The International Herald Tribune

April 2, 2005

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She had arrived only six months ago, and in cat years was barely pushing middle age. But something wasn't right. The restless ball of fur that I'd adopted in November was performing Chaplinesque falls on the kitchen floor.

Sadie's glossy sheen had turned the color of old dishwater and her rumbling purr had given way to an indignant yowl. With her visibly giving up the ghost, I ran, as fast as an ailing cat in a rickety whisker basket would allow, to the nearest vets.

There had been rumors that the place hadn't been the same since the avuncular local vet sold out to a corporate chain. But this wasn't a time for shopping around.

He fixed me with a stare. "The tests will be l263." I nodded whether to acknowledge that I'd understood or to seal the contract, I'm still not sure.

"We have two options," he said (the deft use of "we" implied somehow a sudden confluence of the interests of capital and labor). "We can either keep her on a drip unsupervised for the weekend" pointing vaguely to a row of grim metal cages "or we can take her to a 24-hour medical center in Mayfair where she will get top quality treatment."

Even in my lachrymose state, I couldn't bring myself to spend anymore. It would have to be the cages.

Though I had chosen the economy option, Sadie might as well may have been fed fresh shark-fins in Dorchester Hotel. When I returned on Monday the bill had already reached l600. The tests still hadn't shown what was wrong. If I wanted to know more I could commission a biopsy.

But the bills didn't stop there. The vet had forgotten to mention that I'd need to force two pills down her throat for every day of her life and have a "binding agent" squirted through a pipette into the back of the throat.

He would, of course, be only to happy to sell our monthly supply of tablets for about the same cost again if, in the best-case scenario, she was to live for her new maximum life expectancy of 12 months.

In their defense, the vets have restored a cat to the living that would certainly now be dead. And in retrospect I can't bring myself to admit that I actually regret the decision. But a l1,000 bill to keep a cat alive for 12 months is clearly madness. It could buy 12 weeks British state pension or, according to Oxfam, feed 40 families for a month.

Everyone is telling me that I should have had pet insurance. But somewhere in the recesses of my mind I imagined that I'd be subsidizing acupuncture and stress management courses for neurotic Chihuahuas. And any pet within sight of middle age is uninsurable anyway.

The real villain here is the sentimentalization of animals that has allowed the vet industry to establish a grotesque mirror of human medicine and guilt-trip owners into paying for it.

Now, it is routine for ill pets to be referred to "specialist centers" and owners to be advised to pay for hydrotherapy and "hospice care" for terminally ill dogs. The rest of Europe is catching up with the United States, where an entire industry peddles this snake-oil.

One typical vet's Web site asks: "Does Echinacea help you recover from colds more quickly or gingko improve your circulation? Did you ever think that Spot or Fluffy might want to give these methods a try, too?" And this isn't just for cranks. According to the American Animal Hospital Association's pet owner survey, 31 percent of pet owners have given their pets some form of medicine.

This animal spa-culture has allowed vets to hugely increase their charges. A survey conducted by the British insurers Direct Line recently found that one in four people put their pet to sleep because they cannot afford the potential medical bills. Worse is the fact that many others will opt to keep their pet alive and pay bills they can't afford.

Vets get away with it because they are the last sentimentalized profession. We think of them as the kindly pillars of the community like local butchers and bakers rather than the unforgiving lucre-magnets that the chains have become.

In Britain, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has led a campaign to end taxes on vets' fees which would help.

But the charges aren't going to come down until more of us realize that a white coat is no guarantee of saintliness whatever Sadie might think.

**Rob Blackhurst is a London-based journalist and writer.