So you bought your kids a puppy for the holidays. And now, looking at
your vet bills, the cost of dog food, and several pairs of chewed shoes,
you may be wondering if perhaps you should have just bought them an
Xbox.
Maybe you should have. Many pet owners buy a dog without thinking
through the financial costs of their prospective pooch. According to
Dogtime.com, a news and information website for canine lovers, every
year about 13 million American households adopt a dog or a puppy and
within 12 months half of them have been taken to a shelter.
Odds are, the cost is more than you think. A variety of sources have
different numbers but they're all high. PetInsurance.com places the
average cost of owning a dog -- over the dog's lifetime -- at $20,000.
"I
often try and talk people out of getting a pet and (play) devil's
advocate," says Harrison Forbes, the author of "Dog Talk: Lessons
Learned from a Life With Dogs," host of a nationwide radio pet show, and
a semi-regular pet expert on television, including "Today."
"There's
an odd peer pressure, especially in the shelter world, that we always
need to be pumping up the benefits of pet ownership, and that's great.
I'm fully on board. But it's like homeownership. Owning a house and
having a dog is the American dream, but you only want to do it if you
can afford it. You don't want to have to give either up because you
didn't think it through."
Robin Ganzert, the president
of the American Humane Association, agrees. She is, of course,
unabashedly on the side of the canine: "My dream would be for every
child to have a pet in their lives." But in the same breath, she also
acknowledges, "So many folks are trying to do the right thing and going
to shelters to adopt dogs, but that doesn't mean they're equipped to do
it. They still need to go through the same thought process as you would
if you were buying a dog from an expensive breeder. A lot of dogs are
recycled back into a shelter or abandoned, and it's not a good life for
them."
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