All Pets Deserve Vet Care
All pets deserve vet care. There, I said it. Regardless if you got your little fluff from a pet store on sale for $15 or paid over $1,200 for the trendiest lizard, their worthiness for vet care does not change.
Pets Have Sentience
Most people already know and understand animals have emotions. They have empathy. Scientists recently proved even crabs and other decapod crustaceans like prawns, lobsters, and crawfish, can experience pain. The UK legally recognizes these and cephalopod molluscs, like octopi, squid, and nautilus, as sentient. They feel, remember, and avoid pain. They seek ways to lessen it. Many animals also have thoughts and mental concepts which allow them to understand the world around them.
Pets Have Empathy
So the rat may have thought, “Being in a slowly filling water chamber was cold and scary. I thought I was going to drown, and now it’s happening to another rat! They must be so terrified! I can’t let this happen. I have to help them. The chocolate can wait, and besides, it tastes better when I share it.” It sounds kinda like the origin story of a superhero, but rats do the same.
But it’s not just rats who empathize. Mice, primates, elephants, and other animals also have empathy. They care for others in their own species, and sometimes, those outside their species. Just because they can’t speak our language doesn’t mean they cannot feel.
Many Pets are Self Aware
Snakes, horses, cattle, pigs, magpies, manta rays, and perhaps unsurprisingly, dolphins have self awareness. For the longest time, we believed this trait to be attributed only to humans. However, many other animals show evidence of it.
One way we test for it is the mirror test. While asleep, scientists mark an animal in a spot they can not see without looking in a mirror. When they wake up, if they look in the mirror and try to remove the mark, it is evidence they recognize themselves. Pigeons are one of many species to pass it. But scientists use many other methods, often adapted to be usable by the species being tested, to determine self awareness. For example, while dogs failed the mirror test, they passed the sniff test of self-recognition (STSR) with flying colors. This proves how an animal recognizes themself may differ from how a human does while remaining equally valid.
Pets Have Personalities
Personality is an individual’s unique way of thinking, acting, and feeling. It is the combination of preferences and behavioral differences between individuals which is consistent across different situations. You may already know dogs and cats have personalities. However, science discovered fish, sea anemones, spiders, elk, sharks, mice, and over 100 more species also have them. This includes rodents: rats, hamsters, gerbils, and more. Many scientists suspect individual personality is universal across the animal kingdom and has a significant role in nature.
Pets Can Suffer Mentally
Mental health is not just a human condition. Dogs, cats, horses, and other animals can experience depression, anxiety, dementia, obsessive-compulsive disorders, PTSD, and other mental health conditions.
Dogs can get lick granuloma from obsessively licking their paws. They also can suffer separation anxiety to such extremes they might claw a door bloody trying to get to their people. Common treatments for this are antidepressants, calming music, desensitization training, and exercise. Sounds kinda familiar to what your doctor would say, doesn’t it?
Animals Understanding Humans
Some Pets Can Speak
Understanding Human Behavior
Horses understand human emotion, changing their reaction based on human anger and happiness. Science shows evidence dogs also recognize emotion in human facial expressions. They make decisions based on their understanding of human emotion. They can understand your tone of voice, basic gestures, and body language.
More Than Just Monetary Value
Your pet can think, feel happiness and sadness, have empathy and a willingness to help. That hamster you got for free on a second hand website can form a bond with and remember you. Their quality of life depends completely on you. They depend on you to give them a proper enclosure with enough enrichment, food, and water. They depend on you to check them for health issues when they can’t verbalize complaints. Your pet relies entirely on you to give them a good, happy life. That includes vet care.
Unfortunately, many smaller animals are valued based on their monetary value instead of who and what they are capable of. Mouse sick? Just replace it. Why bother bringing a rabbit to the vet when one can just get another bunny from the shelter? It only cost $35 last time. Why bring a hamster to the vet? It’s cheaper to flush it down the toilet. Statements like these shouldn’t be commonplace, but they are.
Good vet care is as important in animal husbandry as providing a decent enclosure, food, and water. Knowingly and intentionally withholding veterinary care to a pet is illegal neglect. And while these small animals rarely get justice, it is still the law, and it causes unnecessary suffering. Taming an animal requires gaining their trust and starting a bond. Even if they don’t understand, intentionally withholding vet care is breaking that trust in one of the worst ways someone could.
Affording Vet Care
Exotic vets are more expensive than cat and dog vets. Therefore, it is important to save a dedicated vet fund, get pet insurance where reasonable and possible, and look into financing options ahead of time. Emergency funding can come in many forms: a credit card like Care Credit, financing options provided by some veterinarians, and angel funds like Saving Gracie, whose goal is to end economic euthanasia. No pet parent anywhere should ever have to put their pet down for a curable ailment they can’t afford to treat.
Here are some more last resort emergency vet funds:
https://www.petemergencyfund.org/
https://petcube.com/emergency-fund/
https://face4pets.org/apply-for-assistance/
https://www.healspets.org/application-for-financial-assistance/
A pet insurance alternative: https://www.pawamedics.com/
References
Lage, C. A., Wolmarans, W., & Mograbi, D. C. (2022). An evolutionary view of self-awareness. Behavioural processes, 194, 104543. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2021.104543
Appel, M., & Elwood, R. W. (2009). Motivational trade-offs and potential pain experience in hermit crabs. Applied Animal Behaviour Science. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.applanim.2009.03.013
Ben-Ami Bartal, I., Decety, J., Mason, P. (2011). Helping a cagemate in need: Empathy and pro-social behavior in rats. Science, 334(6061), 1427–1430. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1210789 Free PDF: https://europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?accid=PMC3760221&blobtype=pdf
Trösch, M., Cuzol, F., Parias, C., Calandreau, L., Nowak, R., & Lansade, L. (2019). Horses Categorize Human Emotions Cross-Modally Based on Facial Expression and Non-Verbal Vocalizations. Animals : an open access journal from MDPI, 9(11), 862. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani9110862
Albuquerque, N., & Resende, B. (2022). Dogs functionally respond to and use emotional information from human expressions. Evolutionary human sciences, 5, e2. https://doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2022.57
Evans Ogden, L. (2012). Do animals have personality? The importance of individual differences. BioScience, 62(6), 533–537. https://doi.org/10.1525/bio.2012.62.6.4
Sato, N., Tan, L., Tate, K., Yamada, K., Nakagawa, K., & Awata, S. (2015). Rats demonstrate helping behavior toward a soaked conspecific. Animal Cognition, 18(5), 1039–1047. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-015-0872-2
Schuster, A. C., Carl, T., & Foerster, K. (2017). Repeatability and consistency of individual behaviour in juvenile and adult Eurasian harvest mice. Die Naturwissenschaften, 104(3-4), 10. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-017-1430-3
Zanette, L. Y., Hobbs, E. C., Witterick, L. E., MacDougall-Shackleton, S. A., & Clinchy, M. (2019). Predator-induced fear causes PTSD-like changes in the brains and behaviour of wild animals. Scientific reports, 9(1), 11474. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-47684-6
Frank D. (2013). Repetitive behaviors in cats and dogs: are they really a sign of obsessive-compulsive disorders (OCD)?. The Canadian veterinary journal = La revue veterinaire canadienne, 54(2), 129–131. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3552586/
Fitch W. T. (2020). Animal cognition and the evolution of human language: why we cannot focus solely on communication. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 375(1789), 20190046. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0046
Further Reading
Most Americans Have Pets. Almost One Third Can’t Afford Their Vet Care.
