What’s annoying is that dental stuff isn’t even covered under pet insurance.. that’s how I ended up paying £1100 for a bunch of dental work on my dog this year. He’s a lot happier now.
I don’t think you should be a pet owner though if you can’t afford a £1K outlay on their treatments.
Blame regulators, Brexit, and a little corporate greed, before you start blaming Vets or clinic staff.
When the news broke about the CMA investigating Vet practices a couple of months back, the reports were largely correct, that you can get drugs cheaper online than at the Vets, but what they didn’t mention, and what this article didn’t mention, is that clinics are not legally allowed to buy from the same place you and I are. They are only allowed to buy from a small handful of suppliers, who know this, and charge much higher prices than members of the public get when buying online.
So for a basic prescription it can be cheaper to buy online yourself once you’ve had advice from your Vet, but for things that require surgery, the clinic must use it’s own drugs, which are crazy expensive.
Secondly, Brexit fucked the industry. Not just in terms of added costs for importing drugs, but also staff. We once had access to the entire European market of Vets, but since Brexit that’s no longer the case, and clinics are constantly short staffed. As a result, the staff that are already overworked and underpaid are able to job hop to get better salaries, which naturally pushes up costs. Some clinics are also unionising for the first time ever and going on strike over working conditions! This is great news for the staff who work in an industry built on exploitation of their love of animals, but doesn’t help with costs.
Finally, there’s a big dose of good ol’ fashioned corporate greed. As the article mentioned, most clinics are corporate owned and they want more money, so put prices up, but none of that goes to staff, it goes to shareholders.
> “There’s no transparency with costs. When you take your pet to a vet, or any kind of pet professional, it can be difficult to budget for it.”
This argument always annoys me also. Imagine taking your car into the garage for an unknown issue and complaining the mechanic quoted £8k to fix it. That’s just the nature of things. Specialist repairs have high costs and while there are unknowns of course costs will vary. Vets aren’t just going about doing random surgeries and billing you after, they tend to stabilise and offer options, which is where higher costs come in.
Personally, if you can’t afford the insurance on a top tier insurance policy you can’t afford a pet, and I say this as someone paying £70/month for my dogs insurance, he’s more than my home and car insurance combined annually, but the last decision I ever want to have to make is his life vs money.
I suspect that was the vets “fuck off I don’t want to do that” price!
Vets for pets recently wanted over £800 for battery of tests before they would even contemplate removing a small cyst from one of our small dogs, all in it was going to be something like £1400 to remove a growth the size of a very small grape. We went to a local chain who did everything for around £350 minus testing as they said it didn’t warrant it.
If I go to my dentist and ask him to pull teeth out It will cost a couple of hundred quid. Putting new ones back in costs a couple of thousand.
I’ll be a compliant patient, allow him jab my gums and not attempt to bite him. I won’t shit on his chair, or try to escape.
The problem with an animal is that it is very non-compliant, so it needs to be put under. That’s expensive – human anaesthesia is about £600 (and that was a few years ago).
So a grand to knock an animal out and pull its teeth seems OK-ish. Our GSD had worn its front canines down and they may have to be crowned in titanium – that will be 4 grand. Per tooth.
My cat is insured for vet bills up to £7000 a year, I’m hoping I will never have to claim.
Actually I had one of my hamsters teeth filed down and it cost less than £85. Sadly one of them broke and it was irritating him so much he kept licking his front leg and made it sore, then he lost loads of weight and ended up being put to sleep anyway.
That seems quite cheap to me.
My cat needs some antibiotics, a booster vaccine or two, and a weight check, and it’s north of £100.
Removing teeth is tricky, especially in an animal that small. The anaesthesia involved for an animal that small is very tricky too – there’s a fine balance between knocking it out safely, and killing it.
There’s also presumably a fair bit of recovery and monitoring time too to make sure it comes around properly.
All in all, it’s WAY more difficult and specialised than having teeth removed in a human, and that can cost a good £250 per tooth even on the NHS I think.
Vet bills are extortionate, but this doesn’t seem like a particularly jarring example.
>”I would have expected that for a dog or even a cat – but a hamster? That’s ridiculous, especially with the cost of living, and I’m on benefits,” she said.
…why would a hamster be cheaper?
Honest question: do people that spend £500 on their hamsters teeth still have sausages for tea? Because I don’t know what’s happening any more.
Skilled medical work….. what exactly should this cost ?
How much should it be then? Sounds about right considering what’s required.
Er, this doesn’t seem that expensive to me.
I charge $110 per hour for freelance technical writing work and I am nowhere near as well trained for my job as a vet is for theirs, not to mention their overheads and treatment costs.
5 hours seems reaonsable to me, with aftercare etc.
Hamsters have continuously growing teeth and need constant access to things to chew to avoid malocclusion. I can’t really fathom how the owner lets her hamster’s teeth get so long that they need trimming monthly. Their teeth should naturally file down by chewing wood, their food, hay and spays etc
I had a hamster with pyometra and the operation to treat her would’ve been over £600 (sadly she passed before I could get an appointment, finding an exotic vet that had the skills to operate on such a small animal was really hard where I live). But vet bills are part of owning a pet, one of our dogs may need a £5000 surgery to fix her cataracts soon (first consultation with a specialist tomorrow), we have her insured. Vet bills are expensive but so is pet ownership, and we’ve got a responsibility to look after them. If you can’t afford the bills, don’t get pets, it’s not fair on them
So many people in this thread clearly have no fucking clue how complex veterinary stuff is. There is a reason why it takes so long to become a vet. And the salary doesn’t really make up for it either..
Yea healthcare costs money. You don’t see that when you go in with a broken arm to the NHS because it is FREE and they don’t provide you with a recipe at the end showing you how much the whole thing cost the service.
Broken arm is like £3-5k in the NHS btw. About the same cost of a bad dog leg fracture..
£500!? Taking the piss. That hamster just needs to mouth off or spill someone’s pint in rough pub and he’ll have his teeth removed for free!
Honestly this seems good value. What you are getting is :-
-highly skilled expertise
-their time
-their equipment
-expert advise
-proper care for the animal
You could go cheaper, but would you risk that for your pet?
“I would have expected that for a dog or even a cat – but a hamster? That’s ridiculous, especially with the cost of living, and I’m on benefits,” she said.
Genuinely don’t know how to handle this. Like complaining about the cost of your pet wasp’s cancer treatment.
My cat cut her paw and cost well over £1k to treat. Insurance was paid really quickly and covered most of the costs.
I took my pet mayfly into the vets for a scale and polish and they wanted £90. Disgusted that Kier Starmer’s labour government are a fortnight into their premiership and still haven’t done anything to address this rampant profiteering. Beginning to think Rishi wasn’t so bad…
Doesn’t seem overly unreasonable – Vet school + specialism + experience + equipment + over heads.
What price would you put on taking the appendix out of a horse , or resecting the bowel of a German Shepard?
hamsters are worth about £5,.
I know what i would be doing in thi situation and it wouldnt cost me £500.
Robbing bastards, something needs to be done about them.
I’ve been on the receiving end of big vet bills and it does suck, but given the complexity of the care involved it’s not a big surprise. In fact, £500 for removing teeth is less than I’d expect!
The real issue is with pet insurances which, behind all the T&Cs, end up insuring very little in practice.
Removing teeth is usually done by a trained specialist. Why wouldn’t the same apply to a hamster. It’s a very niche surgery. It’s not going to be cheap
25 comments
What’s annoying is that dental stuff isn’t even covered under pet insurance.. that’s how I ended up paying £1100 for a bunch of dental work on my dog this year. He’s a lot happier now.
I don’t think you should be a pet owner though if you can’t afford a £1K outlay on their treatments.
Blame regulators, Brexit, and a little corporate greed, before you start blaming Vets or clinic staff.
When the news broke about the CMA investigating Vet practices a couple of months back, the reports were largely correct, that you can get drugs cheaper online than at the Vets, but what they didn’t mention, and what this article didn’t mention, is that clinics are not legally allowed to buy from the same place you and I are. They are only allowed to buy from a small handful of suppliers, who know this, and charge much higher prices than members of the public get when buying online.
So for a basic prescription it can be cheaper to buy online yourself once you’ve had advice from your Vet, but for things that require surgery, the clinic must use it’s own drugs, which are crazy expensive.
Secondly, Brexit fucked the industry. Not just in terms of added costs for importing drugs, but also staff. We once had access to the entire European market of Vets, but since Brexit that’s no longer the case, and clinics are constantly short staffed. As a result, the staff that are already overworked and underpaid are able to job hop to get better salaries, which naturally pushes up costs. Some clinics are also unionising for the first time ever and going on strike over working conditions! This is great news for the staff who work in an industry built on exploitation of their love of animals, but doesn’t help with costs.
Finally, there’s a big dose of good ol’ fashioned corporate greed. As the article mentioned, most clinics are corporate owned and they want more money, so put prices up, but none of that goes to staff, it goes to shareholders.
> “There’s no transparency with costs. When you take your pet to a vet, or any kind of pet professional, it can be difficult to budget for it.”
This argument always annoys me also. Imagine taking your car into the garage for an unknown issue and complaining the mechanic quoted £8k to fix it. That’s just the nature of things. Specialist repairs have high costs and while there are unknowns of course costs will vary. Vets aren’t just going about doing random surgeries and billing you after, they tend to stabilise and offer options, which is where higher costs come in.
Personally, if you can’t afford the insurance on a top tier insurance policy you can’t afford a pet, and I say this as someone paying £70/month for my dogs insurance, he’s more than my home and car insurance combined annually, but the last decision I ever want to have to make is his life vs money.
I suspect that was the vets “fuck off I don’t want to do that” price!
Vets for pets recently wanted over £800 for battery of tests before they would even contemplate removing a small cyst from one of our small dogs, all in it was going to be something like £1400 to remove a growth the size of a very small grape. We went to a local chain who did everything for around £350 minus testing as they said it didn’t warrant it.
If I go to my dentist and ask him to pull teeth out It will cost a couple of hundred quid. Putting new ones back in costs a couple of thousand.
I’ll be a compliant patient, allow him jab my gums and not attempt to bite him. I won’t shit on his chair, or try to escape.
The problem with an animal is that it is very non-compliant, so it needs to be put under. That’s expensive – human anaesthesia is about £600 (and that was a few years ago).
So a grand to knock an animal out and pull its teeth seems OK-ish. Our GSD had worn its front canines down and they may have to be crowned in titanium – that will be 4 grand. Per tooth.
My cat is insured for vet bills up to £7000 a year, I’m hoping I will never have to claim.
Actually I had one of my hamsters teeth filed down and it cost less than £85. Sadly one of them broke and it was irritating him so much he kept licking his front leg and made it sore, then he lost loads of weight and ended up being put to sleep anyway.
That seems quite cheap to me.
My cat needs some antibiotics, a booster vaccine or two, and a weight check, and it’s north of £100.
Removing teeth is tricky, especially in an animal that small. The anaesthesia involved for an animal that small is very tricky too – there’s a fine balance between knocking it out safely, and killing it.
There’s also presumably a fair bit of recovery and monitoring time too to make sure it comes around properly.
All in all, it’s WAY more difficult and specialised than having teeth removed in a human, and that can cost a good £250 per tooth even on the NHS I think.
Vet bills are extortionate, but this doesn’t seem like a particularly jarring example.
>”I would have expected that for a dog or even a cat – but a hamster? That’s ridiculous, especially with the cost of living, and I’m on benefits,” she said.
…why would a hamster be cheaper?
Honest question: do people that spend £500 on their hamsters teeth still have sausages for tea? Because I don’t know what’s happening any more.
Skilled medical work….. what exactly should this cost ?
How much should it be then? Sounds about right considering what’s required.
Er, this doesn’t seem that expensive to me.
I charge $110 per hour for freelance technical writing work and I am nowhere near as well trained for my job as a vet is for theirs, not to mention their overheads and treatment costs.
5 hours seems reaonsable to me, with aftercare etc.
Hamsters have continuously growing teeth and need constant access to things to chew to avoid malocclusion. I can’t really fathom how the owner lets her hamster’s teeth get so long that they need trimming monthly. Their teeth should naturally file down by chewing wood, their food, hay and spays etc
I had a hamster with pyometra and the operation to treat her would’ve been over £600 (sadly she passed before I could get an appointment, finding an exotic vet that had the skills to operate on such a small animal was really hard where I live). But vet bills are part of owning a pet, one of our dogs may need a £5000 surgery to fix her cataracts soon (first consultation with a specialist tomorrow), we have her insured. Vet bills are expensive but so is pet ownership, and we’ve got a responsibility to look after them. If you can’t afford the bills, don’t get pets, it’s not fair on them
So many people in this thread clearly have no fucking clue how complex veterinary stuff is. There is a reason why it takes so long to become a vet. And the salary doesn’t really make up for it either..
Yea healthcare costs money. You don’t see that when you go in with a broken arm to the NHS because it is FREE and they don’t provide you with a recipe at the end showing you how much the whole thing cost the service.
Broken arm is like £3-5k in the NHS btw. About the same cost of a bad dog leg fracture..
£500!? Taking the piss. That hamster just needs to mouth off or spill someone’s pint in rough pub and he’ll have his teeth removed for free!
Honestly this seems good value. What you are getting is :-
-highly skilled expertise
-their time
-their equipment
-expert advise
-proper care for the animal
You could go cheaper, but would you risk that for your pet?
“I would have expected that for a dog or even a cat – but a hamster? That’s ridiculous, especially with the cost of living, and I’m on benefits,” she said.
Genuinely don’t know how to handle this. Like complaining about the cost of your pet wasp’s cancer treatment.
My cat cut her paw and cost well over £1k to treat. Insurance was paid really quickly and covered most of the costs.
I took my pet mayfly into the vets for a scale and polish and they wanted £90. Disgusted that Kier Starmer’s labour government are a fortnight into their premiership and still haven’t done anything to address this rampant profiteering. Beginning to think Rishi wasn’t so bad…
Doesn’t seem overly unreasonable – Vet school + specialism + experience + equipment + over heads.
What price would you put on taking the appendix out of a horse , or resecting the bowel of a German Shepard?
hamsters are worth about £5,.
I know what i would be doing in thi situation and it wouldnt cost me £500.
Robbing bastards, something needs to be done about them.
I’ve been on the receiving end of big vet bills and it does suck, but given the complexity of the care involved it’s not a big surprise. In fact, £500 for removing teeth is less than I’d expect!
The real issue is with pet insurances which, behind all the T&Cs, end up insuring very little in practice.
Removing teeth is usually done by a trained specialist. Why wouldn’t the same apply to a hamster. It’s a very niche surgery. It’s not going to be cheap