A visit to the vet these days is certainly a very different experience to what it was when I was growing up.
Besides the routine sterilization or vaccination, poor old Spot, or the beloved family tabby generally only got bundled into the car if they were in pretty bad shape and I remember more than one of those incidents ending in a hushed conversation with Mom and shaken heads, followed by a tearful goodbye.
Thankfully in recent years there’s been an incredibly positive shift in terms of the importance that we attach to healthcare for our animal companions.
Advanced diagnostics, joint replacements, hydrotherapy, laser therapy, cancer treatment and a range of other medical miracles are available to keep them healthy (and with us!) for much longer.
Unfortunately most of this doesn’t come cheap.
Let’s imagine you have an after-hours emergency…
The chances are good you’ll be able to find a 24 hour veterinary clinic not too far from your home, but you can expect to pay an after-hours surcharge of around R700-00 and even basic requirements like an x-ray, or cleaning and patching up cuts and scrapes can run up a bill of R1500-00 or more. When things get more serious start adding overnight stay costs, drips, anesthesia, surgical procedures and specialist visits to the list and you’ll find yourself looking at a bill of over ten or even twenty thousand before you know it!
Luckily there are a number of pet medical insurance options available on the market, so for a few hundred rand a month you can restore peace of mind that if one of your furry kids has an accident, or falls ill you can get them the care they need – even when you are down to the end-of-the-month Salticrax.
If you have multiple pets most of the plans available offer a discount rate beyond the first, and will insure both dogs and cats. As with human medical aid bare in mind that all insurance comes with some fine print, so make sure you do your homework and read up on the sub-limits, exclusions and waiting periods before you make a choice.
We won’t tell you which service provider to choose, everyone might have a different need and budgetary requirement, but we will say that Medipet is the personal choice for our training team. You will find their premiums to be a little higher than the others, but they have some unique options that you won’t find elsewhere (like covering hip dysplasia), and if find yourself facing a really serious problem, like torn cruciate ligaments which gets very expensive, you won’t regret the higher premium.
Whichever cover you choose though, please don’t put it off until disaster strikes and you have to choose between life, or death, for your faithful companion purely because of the cost of the treatment.
