Pet owners often assume that preventive veterinary care only consists of taking their pet in for an examination once a year, but that’s only a fraction of it. Veterinary care costs can rack up between annual examinations, especially when pet owners attempt to treat their pets themselves, using whatever can be found online via a quick search or whatever supplies happen to be around the house.
The real cost of skipping the exam
Emergency veterinary treatment can be significantly more expensive than routine preventive care, particularly when extensive diagnostics, overnight monitoring or specialist consultations are required.
So there’s a lot of good sense in taking your pet in for preventive care. That can help you spot a dental problem before you need tooth extractions. It can help you notice slow weight gain before diabetes develops. It can help you see a skin problem before it becomes infected, and spare yourself two pills instead of one.
But owners already know this part. No matter how cheap your annual exams seem, they’re no match for emergency care. And even if your pet sees a vet for all the right reasons, you could still shell out a lot of cash. Owners tend to underestimate that fact.
Self-medicating is the expensive habit nobody admits to
Giving leftover antibiotics from a previous illness. A human painkiller prescription that “should be OK at a lower dose.” A home remedy found on a forum, which happened to cure a friend’s dog with similar symptoms. These all sound like good ways to cut costs in the moment, but the wrong at-home care can leave the original issue unresolved, and you’ll end up facing not one, but two veterinary bills.
It’s particularly important to use caution when it comes to antibiotics. The 2019 Antibiotic Resistance Threats Report from the CDC estimates that 2.8 million antibiotic resistant infections occur each year in the United States. Misuse of antibiotics, including in veterinary medicine, is linked to the development of antibiotic resistance, making future infections more difficult (and expensive) for both people and pets to treat. Antibiotic resistance isn’t just a clinical term; practicing judicious antibiotic use may mean the difference between an infection that clears up with a ten day course of treatment, and a chronic infection that proves resistant to everything.
Storage and labelling: the quiet source of wasted money
When you’re in a pinch, you might not think twice about grabbing a medication from the cabinet, or even from the car glove box, to give your pet. Unfortunately, many medications lose their effectiveness more quickly than you think due to heat, humidity and light exposure.
A medication that’s lost its effectiveness may still be well within its printed expiration date, which can lead to your pet’s condition worsening and requiring stronger and more expensive medications down the road.
And even if the medication is still effective, mistakes can happen. It’s not unusual for a pet parent to hand their pooch or kitty the wrong dosage, or a medication that looks like the right one, but has a faded label. Medications can be under-dosed, over-dosed or confused with another medication altogether.
To avoid these all-too-common errors, be sure to double-check that you’ve got the right medication at the right dosage for your pet before you administer anything. Pet owners can explore available veterinary healthcare products through finepethealth.com, but medication suitability and dosage should be confirmed with a veterinarian before treatment.
Aquatic pets make the case louder than dogs or cats
If your fish is acting funny or your tank is cloudy, resist the urge to rush to the pet store for a bottle of “cure-all” liquid to pour in unchecked. Different fish species metabolize medication differently, and one lousy treatment could wipe out an otherwise healthy tank.
Do a little DIY first. A $15 water test kit that checks for ammonia, nitrite, and pH levels will often pinpoint the cause of fish illness, which is more often water chemistry than disease. As an extra step, consider adding a quarantine tank for new fish arrivals. This allows you to sort out sick fish before they have a chance to affect the rest of the gang. Saves repeated rounds of treatment. Saves costly replacements. Saves needless antibiotics for an entire tank of fish. That adds up, making pet store treatments and healthy fish replacements bad bets, compared to DIY fixing and avoidance.
Pharmaceutical quality is its own hidden expense
It may seem unlikely, but not every product sold online is what’s on the label. Treatments sold for use in aquariums can be grey-market products, and as a result can be counterfeit, sub-potent or ineffective for your fish species. When you use these products and the disease doesn’t resolve you may think your fish is getting sicker, or the disease is resistant, and use another product, when in reality the first product wasn’t the correct strength or appropriate drug for that species. If you source treatments through reliable retailers and ensure they’re appropriate for your fish species and condition you can avoid this scenario.
Just like annual check-ups, proper medication use, storage, and guidance from professionals is all part of responsible pet ownership and prevention. This may seem like an afterthought when all is well, but it’s important to have systems in place to prevent disease.
