Teach Your Pets Budgeting Skills

Inspired by Dubbie, Kenny and Lil Girl

Dubbie and Kenny

Pets have played a feature role in our COVID lives. It’s important to train our pets and encourage desired skills such as sit, stay, don’t scratch the furniture…and, of course, financial planning. I don't know about you, but I saw the 'Pet' slice in my 2020 spending pie chart and passed out. When I came to, I adopted a glass water bowl half-full approach. I recognized that my cats are gifted beasts. They are thoughtful financial planners.

We have three shelter cats.  Just enough to be embarrassed when the pet store clerk says, “Whoa, how many cats do you have?” 

Unlike most people, our cats are 16lb savants with a touch of Munchausen syndrome.  Medically savvy, calculating, and yet, so thoughtful.  At the beginning of each year, they gather privately to research the most obscure maladies of the species (like choosing your weapon in Dungeons and Dragons, but for cats).  Then whoever has the biggest hairball gets to pick the preferred trimester to manifest the chosen malady.  They are thoughtful this way, recognizing that the financial impacts on their servants are best distributed evenly throughout the year. 

So Trimester 1, Kenny has planned a failure of all intestinal organs.  His diagnosis will be one of exclusion, meaning there will be no idea what’s wrong with this cat.  So, let’s decide to cut him open and surgically explore the entire abdominal area.  While there, let’s find nothing conclusively, obviously wrong with the guts...but let’s do note that he shows signs of severe arthritis and immobility in the hips.  Five medicines shall be administered to honor the pancreas, the liver, the intestines and the joints.  Let’s have 2 of the 5 require compounding at a specialty pharmacy along with refrigeration.  Let’s throw in a few that will require a needle.  After surgery, injections, and specialty compounding, Kenny will be as love-bug as ever.  We are on a roll, and it’s only March!

Trimester 2, let’s have Dubbie present with a frantic gasping for air.  He will continue to be impossible to get in a carrier--the cat you have to trap in a bathroom, cloak in a towel and wrestle while wearing welding gloves.  Dubbie shall snort and wail as the stricture in his teensy-tiny nasal passage tightens.  His stomach shall swell to 10x its normal size as he inhales air through his mouth--something cats don’t naturally do--who knew.  You’ll fear he’s dying.  Undiagnosable with regular vet instruments, the condition will require an overnight visit in a specialty clinic’s oxygen chamber, followed by morning reconstructive surgery.  A balloon-type instrument will be inserted into the nasal passage to break open the airway.  This may be a temporary fix requiring re-ballooning, so keep your expectations low.  The post-op steroids shall exacerbate the underlying feline herpes, inducing a fabulous film of some unpronounceable disease in the left eye.  This will look like milky blindness, but is not blindness, according to the Feline Ophthalmologist.  Dubbie will miraculously return to normal, climbing the headboard and leaping onto his owner’s face to alert it’s time for breakfast.  What a summer!

Lil Girl (not so little)

Finally, Trimester 3 will be Lil Girl’s moment.  She has waited so patiently to activate her forehead abscess.  Seemingly overnight, she will turn into a brachiosaurus with an enormous lump between her eyes.  It’ll look like a jawbreaker inserted under the skin.  She will require numerous lab cultures that don’t grow anything particularly interesting.  Finally, something will appear in the Petri dish requiring a simple antibiotic...but, don’t get cocky.  Weeks later, the left eye will be essentially closed shut by a red bump the size of a kidney bean.  Of course this will happen on a Saturday night, so you have to debate, “Do we wait for the regular vet to open Monday or whip into the weekend emergency clinic where Dubbie has a wing named after him?”  Let’s plan for a good, old-fashioned boil lancing.  Lil’ Girl will be back to normal soon, keening in the middle of night just to hear her pretty little Siamese-mix voice scrape the paint off the walls.  What a year!

The humans shall begin to get a complex.  They’ll fear the vet will report them to CPS (cat protective services) because it’s just too curious that all three cats developed rare, suspicious conditions in the same year.  Occam’s Razor. 

Whoever said mutt animals are healthier than pure breeds is delusional. You need a PSA: Pet Savings Account for 2021. An alternative is to become a vet. The school loans may come out a little cheaper, or at a minimum, you’ll likely break even.