Yeah, well if someone can't swing $200 they probably shouldn't own a pet.
Sorry to be so harsh about it, but your comment lacks basic empathy so I figured I'd give you a little dose of same.
food, water, bedding, the ability to keep it safe, vaccines(they're pretty cheap mostly and often done by animal shelters for free--neutering too).
There are so many pets in shelters who could live good happy lives but no one is there to adopt them.
Better a pet to live with an owner who cant afford their chemo when theyre 14 years old than to be euthanized at 2 years old.
As with everything else we are currently screwing up we could do well to look at what smarter countries are doing.
Having enough supply means that when fuzzball junior has a health problem you don't have to choose between going into hock for $500-$1000 for an emergency vet, paying rent, or waiting a month for your regular vet who is also obliged to bill at a level that will pay costs, and repay their lender plus interest.
This is to say that actual cost of service is even worse than it looks due to the necessity of relying on emergency vets to plug massive hole in supply. This encourages individual practices to price discriminate by offering the same services on an emergency basis for much more which further decreases the already scarce vet hours for non-emergency situations.
All of this makes perfect sense from a market perspective but none of it was normal 20 years ago here nor in most of the world so its not fate its a scrape we have gotten ourselves into.
Will say: In theory it sounds great what you are saying, and for many other areas of life it really is great (I've heard lots of storries from her indicating that it's basically paradise), but that doesn't take away from that people don't understand that having a pet is not a human right but a huge responsibility and a luxury that one needs to understand the consequences of having. Instead of crying for daddy/the government when things inevitably come around that were not in the rosy picture when that puppy looked at you.
This is a weird way to say work together to lay the groundwork for a more functional society. Accountability and recognition that are society is ridiculously poorly constructed are complementary not contradictory. It's humorous that you use as an anecdote your "barely middle class" niece and her complaints devoid of context whereas someone working at a burger joint here might not be able to afford to live inside. Over here she would probably either work a second job or her and her pup would live in her car.
The biggest first step towards sanity would be no longer issuing government backed loans for 400k, making pricing requirements and capacity goals based on prior performance to qualify for one thin dime. They might find the will to fire some of the useless expensive staff that aren't actually teaching kids. do a lot of the basic crap inexpensively online, and kick sports to the curb.
Currently we live in a completely broken market that is literally cause by the distortion of uncle Sam's unlimited funds on the educational market with no concurrent regulation to keep it from blowing everything up. The result of a minority of rich fuckers crying to big daddy government.
> This is a weird way to say work together to lay the groundwork for a more functional society.
I see where you are coming from. You don't need to convince me that the U.S. society with its bizarre incentives is deeply broken. I'm all for strong societal support.
But you also need to realize that offloading lots of responsibility to the government (and thereby the rest of society) has real drawbacks. Sadly many people either take advantage of it (in a bad way) or are just so careless that it just leads to overall worse outcomes. That needs to be acknowledged if you want to discuss fundamental rules for a more functional society. We can't ignore those effects.
If food could only be purchased with food stamps and there was societal pressure to offer more and more money indefinitely even if for all the best reasons one would soon find that a can of corn cost $12. Any complaints about regulating grocery stores in such a broken market entirely miss the point. There was never a functional market in that instance to protect. We should either stop pouring in billions or we should put stipulations on performance and price. Doing nothing until the can of corn is $15 doesn't seem tenable.
A cost-benefit analysis could try make a reasonable argument for subsidized animal welfare.
If you can’t afford to take basic care of a pet, don’t get one. Period.
Life is already harsh enough to not add more misery to it for someone else.
I'm not sure poor people not adopting pets would meaningfully change the rate at which pets are born. It just results in fewer pets being adopted.
Particularly true if shelters fix pets before putting them up for adoption.
Most animals that have been bred as pets over 1000s of years are no longer permitted to live without a human caretaker.
If they can't swing $200 for a life-saving procedure for a pet, I'd still advise them to adopt a pet to provide it a home for the window of time when the animal could happily live without any vet services.
A no-cost (or low-cost) adoption is often a life-saving procedure for an owner-less pet.
I grew up poor, by US standards at least, and everyone around me either adopted their pets from shelters or found them as strays on the street. All my pets have been either strays or from a shelter.
The only exception I can think of from my childhood were fish, I think those almost always came from a pet store, but fish tanks were very uncommon.
Even my Axolotl was a rescue, it was given to me in a Tupperware container full of pond water after its previous owner was unable to take care of it.
If you have anything that would suggest it’s common for people who can’t afford $200 in vet services to buy their pets from breeders, I’m open to learning.
Caring for a pet has a cost. The obvious cost is its nutrition, but its health costs must be accounted for as well in the decision to acquire a pet. No matter if you pay a lot for the pet or get it for free, now you have full responsibility for this life. It lives in your captivity, so it's your responsibility to ensure it's being cared for. This is not nature, it can't just live on its own and take care of itself as it would do in nature. It's essentially your prisoner, even if it's rare to see anybody understand that, so you need to provide to its needs. Including health needs. And that incurs a cost. Not _if_ it's needed, it's _when_ it's needed. If you can't "swing" that, then your decision to own a pet was an unbelievably irresponsible one.
The hate shouldn't go towards the vet charging that money for treatment, but towards this irresponsible pet-owner-who-shouldn't-be-one. It's irresponsible mainly towards the pet, but even towards the vet, as the original article demonstrates quite well.
https://fortune.com/recommends/banking/57-percent-of-america...
Ordinary responsible people are going to find themselves deciding what care they can provide for their pet both because of financial challenges personal and societal that weren't evident when they got the pet and because its getting expensive as fuck.
Telling people you need to be middle class in America today to have a pet seems fairly inadequate.
Yes obviously people should not buy things they can't afford. If that means you can't have a pet or a 90k pickup truck, or the shoes you want or whatever then so be it.
Totally bizarre that you see this as some sort of gotcha to phrase it this way