Who's the ingrate in the story?

The cat, right?

Maybe the cat figured out that it was better off at a place where the idea of it leaving broke someone's heart, versus the place it had where needed surgery was the subject of a careful cost benefit analysis.

I do understand the tragedy of people who adore their pets and can't afford required surgery, but if one has the funds, I can't understand what there is to debate. I'd get $1000 surgery for one of our geriatric cats in a heartbeat if they needed it, though they have already lived well past any likely life expectancy. We just spent $500 to try to save our cat who died at the end of 2010, and would have paid more if it would have made her life one bit better.

Yeah -- my Sadie ran up a pretty hefty bill at the end of her life, but it was worth it, though I wish the treatments had given her more time. My parents had a cat who had a liver crisis and spent some time on dialysis, to the tune of over $1000, and I have a cat dentistry bill coming up that will be a few hundred.

Pets can be super costly, and it's a bummer that the expenses are usually unpredictable, but I do my best to suck that up - it's part of the responsibility you take on when you take on pet ownership.

I should get pet insurance, though.

Anyway, yeah, I wasn't sure who was supposed to be the ingrate - maybe you're right that it's the cat, TPS. Cats tend to decide which side the bread is buttered on with some degree of independence. We had a cat for a short while when I was about 10 called Pippin - he was kinda nasty tempered, a lot of scratching and hissing. This was in the days when we still let cats roam outdoors. One day he roamed down the street and took up residence with a family about a block away. We decided that was OK, since he wasn't all that pleasant as a member of our household. We saw him on occasion but basically elected to let him go.

versus the place it had where needed surgery was the subject of a careful cost benefit analysis

Strangely enough I also had to get my cat an operation that cost $1,000. (Maybe vets know that's a good price point.) Afterwards, I told my cat pretty clearly that that was it: she'd better use her own reserve of cat-lives from here on out.

I used to spend summers at my grandma's farm as a kid. One morning, running out to play, I found a dead kitten in the yard. I went and got grandma and she nudged it with her shoe. It was stiff like it had frozen in the middle of hissing. I asked how it had died and she said probably a bobcat got it. While I was wondering just what a bobcat was, grandma picked up the dead kitten by the tail, chucked it into the bushes and walked off. (My mom, having grown up on that farm, still has trouble remembering the names of our cats. One she just called "white cat" its whole life.)

Ultimately, it's just a damn cat. How much would you pay, in a single chunk, to save your pet's life?

I'm glad I've got pet insurance. For Lucy, it's been like a savings bank where every month the premium is sucked away, earns no interest and is just money spent by me. But Bailey needed a cancer op a few years ago, and her last, brief illness before she died, over a few days, including hospital stays, tests and treatments, ran up way over £1,000, so for her the insurance was worth every penny.

When her cancer recurred in September last year, I had to pay for that myself, because she'd had the same type of cancer before, and the insurance only pays for the first lot of treatment. That cost me about £700, but I didn't hesitate and it never occurred to me to think about her not having the operation. But I know I'm lucky that I'm not in a position of having to think, hmmm, does the cat live or do I buy food? I know many people are faced with that dilemma.

As for Lucy, I hope she goes on making me pay into her insurance policy forever, and that I have no need to make any claim on it.

And yeah, fleacircus, I know exactly what you mean about farm people and cats. My friend Daisy has had many farm cats over her 83 years, ever single one of which has been named Kitty, even when she's had a bunch of them at the same time. Then they're Black Kitty, White Kitty, etc.

needed surgery was the subject of a careful cost benefit analysis.

Needed surgery is always a cost benefit analysis. It may be an easy decision, but it's there. There is *always* the question of, "Will this benefit the patient enough to make it worth doing?" in addition to "Can we afford this?"

Hey, a lot of the time, the answer is yes. But every so often, the answer is no, the surgery is the indicated treatment but it won't actually prolong life--or leave the patient with a better quality of life, for the rest of what life there is. And that's a really, really sad thing. Sometimes the treatment isn't worth it, because it will make things worse.

This is why I don't have a pet. I only barely have managed to have enough in savings for an extra month of rent. Yep, not having pets or kids until I can afford them.