Welcoming a pet into your home and heart is a wonderful thing. And it can be one of the best decisions that you will ever make in your life. For one, you get an awesome friend. Moreover, having pets is wonderful for your physical and mental health.
However, wholesomeness aside for a moment, you really do need to be ready to be a pet owner. You can’t be naive. Taking care of another living, thinking, feeling being can be rewarding and challenging… not to mention expensive and demanding.
You have to objectively evaluate whether you can meet your new pet’s wants and needs.
This means looking at how much space you have at home, whether your budget is big enough to meet food, toy, training, and vet expenses, whether you will be able to spend enough time with the animal in the way that it needs, etc.
In other words, your means and lifestyle need to be the right fit. Not someday in the far-off future, but now.
For instance, if you get a dog breed that absolutely needs to stay active to be fit and happy, you probably won’t change your lifestyle overnight if you are incredibly sedentary, sleep in, avoid exercising, and barely go outside. Sure, getting an active doggo can motivate you to improve, too.
However, the smart thing to do here would be to see if you can maintain an active, healthy lifestyle before committing to the pet. Prove to yourself that you’re more than capable of meeting the animal’s needs by changing your lifestyle, instead of assuming that things will magically work out.
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Or, for instance, you want a pet that is incredibly social and requires lots of love, care, affection, and attention (don’t we all, though?). You would be doing this animal an incredible disservice if you barely spent any time with it, say, if you work long hours, constantly travel for work, or have an active social life. If you are rarely home for long, your new pet might get very lonely.
Again, try changing your lifestyle before you commit. Pets are not tech products that you can easily return if something is ‘wrong.’ Giving up a pet after rescuing it is emotionally devastating both for it and you and your entire family because you had already started forming an emotional bond.
Meanwhile, can you actually afford to keep a pet with your current salary? Nobody is saying that you need to treat your cat or dog like royalty (even though they probably deserve it), but you have to be able to afford the basics. Plus, you must have enough cash set aside for medical and other emergencies. And, let us tell you, from experience, visits to the emergency room do not come cheap.
Costs can vary depending on the location, specialist, time of the day, nature of the emergency, animal species, etc. But WebMD notes that, for example, for a large dog, an emergency vet exam might cost between $100 and $150. However, that is just the very tip of the iceberg.
Meanwhile, doing basic blood work for a large dog can cost you between $80 and $200, X-rays or ultrasound can set you back from $150 to $600, and hospitalization for 3 to 5 days can cost from $2,000 to $3,500.
And if your doggo needs emergency surgery, you have to be prepared to shell out anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000.
Meanwhile, Pawlicy Advisor notes that full emergency visits usually start from around $150 and can spike above $1,000. A routine vet visit for your dog, on the other hand, is around ‘just’ $214, while the same visit for a cat might cost you roughly $138.
