|
Post by Moose on Apr 28, 2014 19:45:58 GMT
I was thinking of getting Luthy some basic insurance - prolly too late to get Pip insured at his age, but I will look into that too. Can anyone recommend an insurer in the UK?
|
|
|
Post by tangent on Apr 28, 2014 20:22:11 GMT
We used to have insurance for Cleo from PetPlan. I seem to remember the cost doubled after her eighth birthday and was £15 per month when she died. So, it's not cheap.
|
|
|
Post by Moose on Apr 28, 2014 21:50:26 GMT
well I could get Luthy at least some basic
|
|
|
Post by Alvamiga on Apr 28, 2014 23:38:53 GMT
Not sure there really is basic as such. It's worth checking out the long-term prices though. If you switch provider to get a cheap deal each year, you are excluding any illnesses that may take time to appear as they will claim that they were pre-existing to the policy and are, therefore, exempt, even if so symptoms were showing at the start of the policy and you were unaware of it.
|
|
|
Post by Mari on Apr 29, 2014 10:07:49 GMT
I decided against pet insurance. It is more expensive than paying for vaccinations once or twice a year.
|
|
|
Post by tangent on Apr 29, 2014 11:34:17 GMT
Misty was knocked down by a car and suffered a collapsed lung. The vet's bill came to several hundred pounds, after which we got insurance to avoid another hefty bill. So, it makes sense but is rare that you need it.
|
|
|
Post by Alvamiga on Apr 29, 2014 16:54:25 GMT
I decided against pet insurance. It is more expensive than paying for vaccinations once or twice a year. Vaccinations are something else and are not covered by the insurance. An injured pet can easily run up thousands of pounds in costs for treatment, especially if it is an ongoing condition. It cost almost £700 just to have a lump removed and a biopsy done when Honey developed a benign growth a while back. If it had been anything worse it could have stacked up very rapidly. A friend's dog cost £3000 in one go some years back.
|
|
|
Post by Moose on Apr 29, 2014 17:36:22 GMT
Gandalf's treatment, plus the cost of cremation, came in at a hundred and fifty quid which was virtually impossible for me to find immediately - I had to borrow heavily and took me a while to pay back
|
|
|
Post by tangent on Apr 30, 2014 21:52:04 GMT
Hmm, I hadn't realised that.
Lucy, Deborah's snake, was kept overnight in an oxygen text when she became infected with undeveloped eggs and that cost £200 or so (I forget exactly how much). But it is rare for cats to run up a bill of £3000. The question is, if the vet says it's going to cost x hundreds of pounds, do you agree or do you say, nah, don't bother?
|
|
|
Post by Moose on Apr 30, 2014 22:38:37 GMT
When I took Gandalf in they wanted the money up front. I didn't have any (and obviously they did not know exactly how much it would be but they wanted SOME money up front). I pleaded with them to take him and promised to get the money. They did, I guess largely because he was clearly extremely ill and they were being compassionate (or perhaps because they did not want other people coming in and finding a kitten dying in a carrier on the floor and a tearful owner begging for help). I paid within a cpl days of his death tho as I said I had to borrow and took me longer to repay that
|
|
|
Post by raspberrybullets on May 1, 2014 10:24:22 GMT
Somebody over here had to get their dog to have a hook removed from their stomach and the vet bils cost about $3000 AUD. But if your cats are indoor they are less likely to have such problems.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on May 1, 2014 11:56:01 GMT
Our guinea-pigs are not insured. Mainly becasue they are small and there are a lot of things we wouldn't have done if they got ill. They offered to do surgery on Basil which would have been 600 to 700 €, but they would have needed to take a kidney out, the gallbladder and something else and we decided that was too much for such a small animal. He proved us right as he died just two weeks later, so he was already so weak he probably wouldn't have made it through surgery. It's better to put some money aside for emergencies.
|
|
|
Post by Miisa on May 1, 2014 13:33:14 GMT
My dogs are insured against medical emergencies, mainly as there are two of them and they are outside a lot, but my cats are not.
|
|
|
Post by tangent on May 1, 2014 17:49:32 GMT
I was a bit scared of the costs when we left our cat, Misty, overnight with a collapsed lung, thinking it would cost £2000 but it only cost £600. Still a lot of money but it's awful having to make the decision of how much money to pay to save them. My inclination is that small animals are unlikely to survive and it is kindest to them to let them die.
|
|
|
Post by Alvamiga on May 1, 2014 19:37:21 GMT
Somebody over here had to get their dog to have a hook removed from their stomach and the vet bils cost about $3000 AUD. But if your cats are indoor they are less likely to have such problems. One of the local wooded areas recently had posters up warning dog owners that someone had been leaving meat there, containing fishing hooks. That's an evil thing to do!
|
|
|
Post by Mari on May 4, 2014 8:38:12 GMT
Yes, there are plenty of sick people out there. Sometimes we are warned on the news for someone leaving meat with rat poison on it out for cats.
Anyway, my two are indoor cats and though I love them, I wouldn't pay hundreds of euros for treatment.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on May 8, 2014 6:06:31 GMT
My inclination is that small animals are unlikely to survive and it is kindest to them to let them die. That's what we think. if it gets that expensive, it's usually too bad for them to make it anyway.
|
|
|
Post by Alvamiga on May 8, 2014 8:18:17 GMT
Very often there is not much that can be done with small animals. When our 13-week old bunny was taken ill, the vet could only keep her on fluids and hope the problem sorted itself as the anaesthetic needed for the operation would have killed her if she was not in the best of health to begin with. The vet told us that anything smaller that a cat would be a similar case as there is little room for redundancy in the animal's body and it pretty much all needs to be fully working to survive.
|
|
|
Post by tangent on May 8, 2014 20:12:22 GMT
Lucy nearly died from undeveloped eggs in her abdomen which became infected. The vet operated on her and put her on a oxygen ventilator and she survived for another couple of years (Pat says a lot longer) but she was a bit sickly after that.
|
|
|
Post by juju on May 9, 2014 9:21:15 GMT
I have insurance for my dog, which started off at about £4 a month but gets more every year. I've just swapped to another provider which knocked it down from £14 to £9.80 a month, but I have to pay £100 excess. I was really glad of it last year though - Kizzy got a kidney infection and the final bill was over £700.
|
|
|
Post by Alvamiga on May 9, 2014 10:22:14 GMT
The reason it goes down is that the new provider isn't having to cover the possibility of anything before the day they took over, which wipes out a huge number of things you can potentially claim for.
|
|