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Comment by InSteady | Hacker News Reader

That's an extremely easy thing to say from a place of privilege, and of course there is some truth to it. On the other hand, how many chronically broke and miserable people out there are only hanging on for love of a pet (perhaps the only consistent source of love and meaning in their adult or entire lives)? I'll bet its a lot. But fuck them, they're poor so I guess they should either tough it out alone or die.

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.

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I'd love to have a pet too, but I don't have the conditions for that (including financial conditions), so I don't. Even though I'd love to. But having a pet is responsibility, which includes financial responsibility. So yes, you shouldn't have a right to have a pet, when you can't afford it. That it may even be controversial is bewildering to me. Animals aren't things which exist for your pleasure.

Pets are companions who you steward because you're the name on the lease and the one with the bank account. Like all living things, they're usually healthy without intervention as long as their basic needs are met. If you can fulfill that stewardship 100% of the time for 5 or 10 or 20 years, but then can't pull things together in some exceptional case at the end, that's not a failing. That's just one of those sad things that happens in life.

As long as you can afford basic care for a pet, then you can have a pet.

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.

Back when I was broke I owned a cat. There were literally times in my life that the only reason that I didn't paint the ceiling with my brains was because I was worried what would happen to that cat.

Anyone who has to say ‘from a place of priviledge’ over a comment like that is just being an asshole. Which is what you’re doing.

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.

Who are you proposing should carry the cost then? Society?

Well decades before people didn't graduate with hundreds of thousands in debt. If you follow that chain and look at the colleges which have been replacing highly paid professors with adjunct professors paid little more per hour than people who make french fries its not professors sucking up those costs. It looks more like trying hard to minimize money paid to professors while charging what the market will bear wherein the price the market will bear is inherently distorted by huge piles of government money available that people are in turned obliged to borrow in order to break into their desired profession.

As with everything else we are currently screwing up we could do well to look at what smarter countries are doing.

Smarter countries are providing pet care for people who can't afford it? Which country do you mean exactly?

Smarter countries make education affordable instead of a government sponsored bonanza for the financial class leading to greater supply of vets who haven't had to front load their life with 200-400k in debt to reach the starting line of their profession. This leads to more supply per capita in theory and in fact.

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.

All that you are describing matches Sweden quite well. Still, my niece who lives there (and only barely counts as middle class, working at a burger joint in Stockholm) regularly rants about that she doesn't have the money to get care for her dog. Maybe she should just not have a dog.

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.

> Instead of crying for daddy/the government

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.

> > Instead of crying for daddy/the 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.

I again was never suggesting societal support for veterinary care. I was suggesting we fix our broken educational system. You mention that offloading responsibility to the government has real drawbacks. We are already experiencing those drawbacks. Again empowering people to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars of uncle sams money distorts the educational market and massive debt beyond what is profitable is hurting our supply of vets which is directly bearing on the cost of service.

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.

I could see an argument for that. If society is already paying high costs in order to prevent poor mental health and loneliness, pet ownership may be a cheaper solution in some situations than letting people fall into worse conditions that require time off work, pills and therapists.

A cost-benefit analysis could try make a reasonable argument for subsidized animal welfare.

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