Our boxer, Cleo, sprawled awkwardly on the floor of an examination room while a veterinary technician reviewed the cost of her imminent surgery with my wife and me. I listened, but the numbers barely registered. In a building full of animals, our dog should have been wagging her tail and sniffing around enthusiastically. Instead, she lay quietly. Boxers always look worried. For once, Cleo’s expression seemed appropriate.
Muscular and fit, she had started having trouble walking just the day before, prompting a visit to her vet that March evening. At Qi Veterinary Clinic in Shelburne, after X-rays and a hands-on examination, Dr. Nathan Heilman suspected that inflammation around a back injury — we don’t know exactly what happened — was pressuring her spinal cord. He provided drugs and herbs to address swelling. If she wasn’t improving by morning, he warned, she might need surgery — and quickly.
The next day, Cleo could barely stand. When she took steps, she stumbled drunkenly. She couldn’t squat to relieve herself. Staff at Qi found a clinic with a neurologist who could see Cleo that day, and my wife and I drove three hours to Upstate Veterinary Specialties in Latham, N.Y., just outside Albany.
An MRI there showed that ruptured discs were putting pressure on Cleo’s spine. A neurologist was prepared to perform a complicated, hours-long procedure that very night. The vet tech delivered the punch line: Our bill, which included the MRI, drugs and an anticipated postsurgical stay of several nights, would run roughly $14,600.
My wife and I now faced a dilemma common to many families: a veterinary bill that once would have seemed unimaginable.
My wife and I now faced a dilemma common to many families : a veterinary bill that once would have seemed unimaginable. The cost of vet care has shot up nearly a third in the past five years, according to one pet insurance company. It has significantly outpaced inflation.
One major factor is increasingly advanced care. Vets with specialties such as oncology, neurology and cardiology use expensive diagnostic equipment and advanced surgical techniques to extend the lifespans of family pets.
The lucrative industry is attracting private equity-backed owners, including in Vermont. For instance, Burlington Emergency & Veterinary Specialists, or BEVS, in Williston and Petit Brook Veterinary Clinic in Colchester are now affiliated with Rarebreed Veterinary Partners, a growing firm based in Portland, Maine, that has bought up dozens of independent offices. (In a “For Sellers” section on its website, Rarebreed addresses independent vets: “You’ve poured your heart into your practice and made it something special. Your healthcare team is like family to you, and protecting their jobs is a top priority. It is for us too.”)
Earlier this month, VEG ER for Pets, a privately held, investor-backed company that operates more than 130 facilities, opened an emergency care practice in South Burlington.
Some elected officials, including U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), allege that the consolidation of veterinary services has led to higher prices.
Dr. Britt Shorter, the medical director at Petit Brook, said its agreement with Rarebreed allows the practice to get help for administrative work such as bookkeeping while preserving its autonomy when it comes to patients. “We make our own medical and care decisions,” he said.
While costs may be up, he said, before the pandemic, vets had been billing so low that they were “eating costs” of care. He noted that training to become a vet is expensive, as are livable wages for staffers and the necessary modern equipment.
Chauntel Cook, the hospital director at BEVS, said costs are rising across the veterinary sector, not just at corporate-owned practices. Rarebreed helps keep staff trained and equipped for cutting-edge care, she said, noting that before VEG ER opened, BEVS was the only 24-hour emergency clinic in Vermont.
Rarebreed did not respond to phone inquiries.
More Americans are turning to pet insurance in an attempt to manage the cost of care. While the number of insured pets more than doubled between 2020 and 2024, only about 5.5 percent of dogs and 2 percent of cats had coverage, according to the North American Pet Health Insurance Association.
Limited help is available to owners who can’t pay. The Humane Society of Chittenden County offers aid to low-income families whose pets face life-threatening conditions. Its Rainy Day Fund distributed $53,000 last year, according to Jess Wilson, the society’s executive director. One woman feared that she’d have to have her cat put down because she couldn’t afford surgery for a stone in its bladder — until the fund stepped in.
Families are willing to shell out for expensive care even when it eats into household budgets. Consider the saga of Bob Marley, a mutt who lives on Fisher Brothers Farm in Shelburne, the home of Sisters of Anarchy Ice Cream.
When the dog ingested poison a few years ago, a vet at BEVS informed his family that the gravely ill canine would have a 50-50 chance of surviving if they decided to spring for what Sisters of Anarchy co-owner Becky Castle called a “full-body blood transfusion.” The cost: $7,000.
Castle said her husband told their children that if they went ahead, the family would have to forgo vacations and dinners out for months. They green-lighted the treatment. Bob Marley recovered.
The dog has had other serious scrapes, according to Castle. He was once hit by a truck, and he survived a vicious fight with another canine. He had surgery for a torn ACL. His misadventures, she said, have set them back “north of $35,000.”
“We jokingly call him our UVM education,” she said.
Why underwrite all that care?
“Our dog consistently brings joy into our house,” Castle explained.
By contrast, my dog finds joy in slipping off her leash or through an open gate and running exuberantly around Burlington’s Old North End with me in pursuit.
Cleo is our third boxer. She’s 7. Until recently, she’d never been seriously sick or injured.
Typical for her breed, she is strong-minded and slow to obey any human who is not offering her a treat. She despises cats. She has been skunked three times, which has not dimmed her enthusiasm for pursuing the animals. On walks, she enjoys menacing felines and foraging pizza crusts. Cleo is an excellent hiking companion and fond of naps. She is cute. She likes to curl up next to humans in winter. She has a lot of nicknames, including Puddin’, Vladimir Puddin’, Ms. Muddy Paws and the Notorious C.L.E.O.
We’ve never blinked at a vet bill for any of our dogs. We’ve paid for treatment, salves and surgeries to address torn ligaments, swallowed rocks, tapeworms and the consumption of pills prescribed for a human — and the bottle that contained them.
In 2010, we had a pacemaker implanted in our first dog, Sadie. It cost about $5,000, and she lived another year and a half thanks to the device. A lovely dog, she was worth every penny.
Still, that $5,000 was sitting in our bank account. This time around, my wife and I didn’t have the nearly $15,000 for surgery readily available, and we talked about options.
Situations such as this are pricing some families out of owning pets, according to findings in a LendingTree 2024 Pet Debt report. Many people surveyed by the lender said they wouldn’t own a pet again. And 12 percent of Americans reported giving away an animal they could no longer afford. More than a third of pet owners indicated they had assumed debt for their animals; two out of three blamed an underlying medical emergency.
People are facing “impossible decisions,” Wilson said, and some who surrender animals to her organization cite the cost of medical care.
My wife and I signed a pledge to pay for Cleo’s surgery and plopped down a Visa card for a deposit. Later, following a tip from staff at Qi, we applied for a CareCredit card from Synchrony, a company that offers credit specifically for pet care. It’s a zero-interest card — for now — and that’s how we ultimately paid.
A few days after Cleo’s surgery, we filled up our SUV again with wartime gas and headed to Latham to pick her up. The dog’s back was shaved; staples lined the nearly foot-long incision. She was in a fog from drugs administered for pain and anxiety. She couldn’t walk without a sling, and her hind feet tended to curl involuntarily. Techs taught us how to “express” urine by applying pressure, but only if she couldn’t pee by herself.
It would be days or weeks before we knew how much function she would regain. She needed to be crated for eight weeks, we were advised.
For days, she mostly slept. She fouled her crate routinely. Our washer and dryer were full of dog blankets. She seemed morose, and I began to worry that she could no longer wag her tail.
Then, progress. One day, she wobbled to her feet. Later, her paws uncurled. Her hind legs seemed to start remembering their role, and she demonstrated improved range of motion. She stopped relieving herself in the crate.
Six weeks after the procedure, we gassed up again and took her back to Latham for a follow-up with her surgeon, Dr. Christina Scanlon Isack. As Cleo strutted down a hallway in the practice, still a tad noodle-legged, her surgeon beamed. The dog wagged her tail. Her doctor informed us that we no longer needed to support her with the sling: Cleo could walk on her own again.
Scanlon Isack told us that she’d never performed this surgery on a boxer before Cleo; her patients were more likely to be, say, dachshunds. Cleo could continue to recover and become more sure-footed, she told us, but “might always have a little hitch in her giddyup.”
As we left the center, Cleo pranced happily on the lawn. She clearly didn’t miss her sling. She didn’t even seem to mind when a small dog with a graying muzzle yapped furiously at her on the way to a car with its owner. As the dog passed by, I couldn’t help but notice the diaper peeking out from under its jacket. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Care of the Dog | Veterinary treatments are getting more sophisticated — and expensive. I learned how much the hard way.”
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