In the earliest days of veterinary medicine, back in the 1800s, there were no hospitals for pets. There were far fewer pets to treat. That’s because animals were everywhere, although their primary purpose was for labor, not love. This doesn’t mean that there was no love. There has always been love, to greater or lesser degrees. What’s changed, more recently, is, perhaps, the intensity of the love along with our ability, and concomitant willingness, to treat our animals with the same, or similar, technological prowess that we would want for ourselves, or nearly so. Thus, gone are the days when veterinary care occurred in the barnyard, often by failed farriers looking to earn a living. The tools of the trade back then were brutal, flailing horses held down as cigar-chomping “surgeons” hacked off the blue bags of a stallion’s testicles.
The twentieth century saw many technical and scientific advances—the combustible gas-powered engine, vaccines for polio, and pasteurization for milk, to name a few—and there’s no question that veterinary medicine was amongst them. As barnyard animals disappeared more and more from mainstream American life, so too did the barnyard vet, his primitive tools replaced with antiseptic power-driven appliances that characterize so much of modern medicine, his sheep and goats and chickens now shampooed lap dogs and fine-boned huskies with bead-blue eyes and soap-white coats. And whereas, in the nineteenth century, “vets” had minimal education, if any at all, they now are required to slog through years of training more intense than an ordinary doctor’s as they memorized the anatomy of everything from elephants to octopi. Thus, the burgeoning of high-tech animal hospitals all across this country reflects both the fierce attachments contemporary people have for their pets, as well as the increased numbers of highly trained veterinarians who come not only with a medical degree but often with one or several subspecialties under their belts. These are veterinary doctors who can reengineer gimpy legs, who can cut out a tendrilling tumor with near total precision, who can concoct chemotherapies in different doses and degrees depending on species and the specifics of the cancer in question. These are doctors who push titanium pins into bones and put pacemakers in hearts that look very much like ours. The price for these specialized services? Let’s just say—a lot. We’ll get to that. For the moment, think of people emptying their pockets. Pets prove our economic theories all wrong. Pets have almost zero monetary value, and yet we willingly invest in them, again and again. Unlike children, they can’t care for us in our dotage, or better yet, carry on our chromosomal torch. Basic economic theory says that people spend money to earn it—the core concept in investment—but when it comes to our pets the opposite is true. We spend money to lose it, again and again, in love.
The hospital I arrived at that day with my dog is emblematic of the vast shape-shifting changes in veterinary medicine and animal owners that have occurred over the past few hundred years. It’s a piece of prime real estate located amidst a row of biotechnology companies on a tony road just off the highway. I carried my panting puppy in through the pneumatic doors. A Bernese mountain dog lying sideways on a stretcher was whisked past me by two masked attendants. On the wall behind the reception desk hung poster-sized photographs of the veterinarians: no barnyard surgeons here. Each one was coiffed and poised, and below the framed photos were gold plaques inscribed with their specialties: neurology, oncology, pediatrics, psychology. The Bernese mountain dog was stalled outside the OR doors. He lay still on his side, his front paws politely, precisely, crossed. His yellow eyes met mine. I had the distinct feeling he was from a fairytale, a prince put under a spell, his carcass canine, his mind man.
A doctor ushered me into a small examination room. With thumb and forefinger she pried apart Lila’s clamped lids and I could see it then, how her normally amber eyes were filled with milk, glinting a dull bluish color, all opaque. Her eyes were oozing, and when I touched the fluid dampening her fur it felt gluey.
The doctor called in the staff ophthalmologist, who came trailing some sort of machine, the probe of which she pressed right up against Lila’s pupil in a way that made me wince. “Seventy-five,” the ophthalmologist said. The two doctors looked at each other grimly. Lila had gone still, stunned or dead I could not tell. They peeled back her other eye and again, pressed the probe right to its center. “Eighty-three” the ophthalmologist announced. They turned to me. “Your dog has glaucoma,” the ophthalmologist said. “The pressure in her eyes has risen well beyond normal.”
Glaucoma. I had heard of that before. It did not seem so bad. I was wrong. In people glaucoma is manageable. In dogs it is devastating, in part because it is so much more painful. The pounding pressure winches the canine’s much smaller skull, causing a migraine well beyond what humans can conceive. Lila lay rigid with agony, her snout and fur hot to the touch. “The pressure has gone so high,” the ophthalmologist said, “it has crushed both optic nerves. Lila is permanently blind.”
I left Lila at the hospital that day and for two days following. I left distraught; my puppy was in pain. On my way out, the receptionist presented me with the first half of my bill: $1,400. This made me more distraught. I looked again. My eyes, after all, were working. Fourteen hundred dollars for the ER visit, the emergency ophthalmology consult, the forty-eight-hour boarding fee. The projected costs were on the second page. The only one I recall is the $1,800 charge for the CAT scan that might be necessary. “Does everyone pay these charges?” I asked. “What happens if people don’t have the money?”
“That hardly ever happens,” the receptionist said. “People find a way to pay.”
No one knows exactly when pets were invented. That they were invented is not a subject in much dispute. Though animals have populated the planet long before hominoids made their mark, pets are a product of human culture. And, like all cultural products, their meaning has evolved as fads and fashion change.
In Victorian times, only one in fifty families in the United States owned a dog or a cat. Now, in 2011, roughly 62 percent of families own a pet and there are three times as many pet owners as there were in the 1980s. Sociologists hypothesize this is due to rising divorce rates and the “Bowling Alone” phenomenon so well described by Robert Putnam in his book that discusses the collapse of communities in a country where civic engagement—membership in clubs and leagues, for instance—is on the decline while mistrust of government steadily rises. Pets, people think, are filling a vacancy, our devotion to them coming from deficit.
I disagree. Might our increasing willingness to not only own but finance our companion animals come from something finer? As the planet erodes, and as our role as its destroyer becomes harder and harder to deny, might we not be considering, for the first time, the idea that the human species is far from sacred? Might we, in losing the sense of our own sanctity, be better able to see our kinship with species not ours? I don’t know. What I do know is that in several states, along with some provinces in Canada, the term “pet” has become disagreeable to enough people that the word has been virtually banned and in its place this phrase—“animal guardian.” I do know, according to a 2007 British study funded by Purina, that 75 percent of respondents claimed to spend more money on their pets’ health than on their own. After Hurricane Katrina, when hundreds of thousands of people were forced to abandon their pets because emergency helicopter transfer refused to allow the animals on board or emergency shelters banned animals from entering, Representative Tom Lantos introduced the Pet Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act, which requires any state seeking FEMA assistance in an emergency to accommodate companion animals in their evacuation plans. And if you think those plans circle mostly around cats and dogs, think again. Pet-owning Americans have snakes, gerbils, black-bear hamsters, furry ferrets, pot-bellied pigs, and, perhaps oddest of all, fish. Fish? Yes, apparently we’ve become fonder and fonder over the years of plain old carp, or koi, with more Americans owning them than dogs and cats. Thus there are now, in this country, more than two thousand fish vet specialists who perform CAT scans, X-rays, and even M
RIs on our aquatic friends and, yes, people are willing to pay, people like David Smothers whose koi, called Ladyfish, was struck by lightning as she swam in her pond during a violent electrical storm in the summer of 2001. According to a Nova episode, a vet fish specialist did a series of CAT scans and ascertained that her back was broken. Said Smothers, “The fish was certainly going to die. There was no doubt about that.” The fish vet specialist brought Smothers’s koi into both neurosurgery and orthopedic surgery, where other fish vet specialists were able to stabilize her spine using screws and wires, plus some epoxy.
I drove home. My dog was neither dying nor dead, but the fact of her pain was painful, and then what would her life become once the pain subsided? A blind dog. A dog who had lived an entire decade with the benefit of sight, her vision suddenly yanked away from her, and no words to explain what was happening. It was late in the day now, the clouds like cataracts spreading. Inside, my daughter was riding her scooter in our hallway. “Lila has gone blind,” I said to her. I started to cry. I told my husband later, when he returned from work. I did not mention the veterinary bill. Instead, I called the bank, cashed in a CD, paid the penalty.
Two days later, I drove back to the hospital. The final bill was $3,338. I figured this was a one-time cost that my liquidated CD could cover. They brought Lila to me. She did not come out on a leash. She came out carried, and when they set her in my lap I could see, immediately, that a dog can be devastated. The medications had brought the pressure down, so her eyes were open, but they were thickened, blank, like pale-blue opaque sea glass, glassy, reflective but not receptive. In her eyes I could see my face, but she could not see mine. “Lila, Lila,” I whispered. She moved her whole head in the direction of my voice but gave not the tiniest tail wag, not the slightest ear prick. I started to weep again.
Back at home, I set Lila on the floor of our living room, but even here, amidst familiar scents, she would not move. Musashi, our other dog and her sibling, bounded forward in his typical greeting style but something, some smell, some sense, stopped him short. He skidded to a bunched halt and then cautiously extended his snout to sniff his companion of eleven years—where had she been all these days? Lila stayed stone still. Musashi backed away and then clattered, fast, up the steps. “Lila, Lila,” I called, my daughter called, even my husband called, but the dog was too terrified, or despairing, to move. At last I picked her up, carried her to our bed. I slept with her for one week straight, my face buried in her fur, her pee soaking the sheets, her eyes weeping pus and drops.
I ordered a book about blind dogs and when it came—express shipment—I read that older alpha dogs do not adjust well to the sudden, inexplicable shift of total blindness. I stroked Lila’s skull, moved my fingers through her dense fur, sent my husband to the pharmacy to fill the prescriptions. My husband—with his own mysterious arm ailment aching away his days—had been kicked out of the marital bed and was daily scraping up with a putty knife the hardened scat Lila left on the floors. “Four hundred dollars,” he said when he returned, holding the paper bag. “Four hundred dollars for a one-month’s supply of this stuff.”
Now this was hard to believe. The tubes were doll sized and when you squeezed, a glistening bead of gel oozed to the tip of the nozzle. How could grease cost so much? What choice did we have? While the medications would not restore a single stripe of sight to Lila’s world, they would prevent the pain of pressure crushing her head.
“Maybe,” my husband said, “we should put Lila down.”
“Put Lila down,” I repeated mechanically. “Put her down.”
“She’s had eleven good years,” my husband said. “Look at her now.”
Yes, look at her now. Lying in a puddle of pee on what was our marital bed.
I called the ophthalmologist. “Should we put her down?” I asked.
I expected equivocation, but instead she said, “God no! A blind dog can do quite well once it adapts. Dogs rely primarily on their sense of smell. It’s not like a human.”
“Lila’s depressed,” I said. “She won’t move.”
“Put her on her leash,” the doctor said. “Take her out. Have expectations. Refuse to baby her. I’ve seen blind dogs forge rapids, climb mountains. If you teach them toughness, they’ll be tough.”
I brought Lila outside. I made a Hansel and Gretel path through the woods by our home, using beef instead of breadcrumbs. That got her going. She found the shreds of roast, tasted baked blood, and remembered the meaning of life.
Slowly, over the weeks, Lila began to make her way. I watched my husband watch her. His own unnamed pain was slowly shrinking his world; by day he sought a diagnosis and then night after night he sat in his study with just one little light. And now here was Lila, with no little lights, forging forward, and he watched. A month passed. We needed more medication.
It was June then. School ended. My daughter’s day camp was three thousand dollars, one of the hoity-toity arts camps I’d signed her up for as a way of alleviating the guilt I felt for not being able to afford private school. Now, however, I had to choose between Clara’s camp and Lila’s eyes. My husband insisted the issue was clear. We should choose Clara’s camp. To me it was not so clear. If Clara did not go the fancy camp, she could still enjoy her summer. If Lila did not get her medications, she would not only not enjoy her summer; she would pass it in agony. And agony is a serious problem for any sentient being.
A dilemma such as this one is relatively new in the history of pet owning. Sixty years ago, the average pet owner could expect to spend somewhere in the ballpark of $200 for care during the entire lifespan of his or her pet. Now the average lifetime cost of the American pet ranges from $10,000 to $20,000, and this isn’t simply due to inflation. It’s due to the fact that veterinary care, starting sometime in the 1980s, began to change dramatically as its technological capacities expanded. Prior to the 1980s, animal care meant yearly vaccinations, an occasional splint for a broken bone, and the price of euthanasia if necessary. Compare that to today, as veterinary students are now training in specialties and subspecialties and subspecialties of those subspecialties, and can therefore offer Fido, should he need it, a kidney transplant, cancer chemotherapy, back surgery, titanium hip-joint replacement, radiation treatment, neurological correction—you name it. Add to this the fact that from 1987 to 2000 the life spans of dogs and cats increased by more than one-third due to improved nutrition and vaccinations. Prior to 1987, my Lila may very well have died from crappy kibble before reaching old age and its complications, like glaucoma, and thus I would have been spared the difficult game of weighing the relative value of my daughter’s education versus my dog’s comfort.
The whole experience of struggling with the relative worth of dog and daughter led me to seek out other like-minded people who had made what many might consider outlandish, even outrageous decisions as regards their animals. My husband felt (felt at first, but soon this, like so much else about his connection to our blind beast would transform in the face of his pain) that I was being led like a blind donkey on the string of sentimentality and that if I took a hard-headed view of things, I would see that spending four hundred dollars a month on a decade-old dog was wrong—wrong for our family, wrong for our marriage, wrong for the world. Because that’s what I was doing. I took on as many extra work assignments as I could. According to my husband, everyone would be much better served were I to donate the monthly medication payments to the starving countries on the continent of Africa, to the Green Party, to victims of lymphoma. His beliefs are echoed by Dr. Bruce Alexander, professor of psychology at Simon Fraser University in Canada who told me, “If Americans were to take all the money they spend on kibble yearly—an amount that’s surely in the millions, if not the billions—it would be enough to feed countless people starving in Africa. It would be enough to fund multiple orphanages in Asia for the foreseeable future.” In other words, dog lovers are baby killers. Shame on us.
Shame on Darrell Hallett and his wife, Ni
na, a Seattle couple who, in 2005, spent $45,000 to get their dog a stem-cell transplant for lymphoma. Shame on Agnieszka Onichimiuk, who, according to the Wall Street Journal, spent $7,000 to remove a tumor from her dog Jake’s eyelid. Shame on all the people who are spending roughly $10,000 a year to house their aged pets in Japan’s newest, and only, long-term-care facility for geriatric animals, a posh place where one can be assured their feline or canine companion is living, and dying, with more dignity than millions of human octogenarians and nonagenarians in the surrounding area.
It is of course not difficult to find many naysayers when it comes to spending funds as large as these on pets. The idea that such expenses may be valid, while gaining ground, is still well below sea level. And that disdain crosses cultures, and is probably more prevalent in non-Western cultures, the people of which, in general, tend to believe that doting on one’s pet is a sign of Western excess. Thus, the Saudi Arabians have, as of September 8, 2006, banned the sales of all dogs and cats in their country. This decree, which applies to the city of Jiddah and the holy city of Mecca, states, “Some youths have been buying them and parading them in public.” Wrote one Aleetha al-Jihini in a letter to Al Madina newspaper, “One bad habit spreading among our youth is the acquisition of dogs and showing them off in the streets and mall … this is blind emulation of the infidels.”
I know I am an infidel, in more ways that I care to mention. I have made too many mistakes in my life and have too often been propelled out of greed or, more problematic for me, fear, so that I clutch rather than touch, ruining whatever it is I seek to claim. I can discuss my deficits, but I am not yet ready to admit to the particular one of which we are speaking, even as I state it as a possibility. Could it not be equally possible, though, that valuing nonhuman animals as much as, if not even more than, our own kind, is a sign of a higher kind of consciousness composed of the very sort of sentience and humility we may need if we are to clean up the mess we’ve made on Earth? It stands to reason that, if we made the mess out of deep disregard for the ecosystem that sustains us, we are only likely to change course and correct once that deep and damaging disregard turns into real respect, or even love.
The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals Page 21