The Last Meow Summary

In the article “The Last Meow”, written by Burkhard Bilger and published in the New Yorker, Bilger describes the current life of owning a pet and just how many expenses go into these animals. Bilger believes the care for pets nowadays is too extreme and that people spend way too much money to perform outrageous surgeries along with other beneficial practices just to save their pets. I agree with him to an extent. Although I do believe some smaller practices are necessary to help pets, like treatments when they get injured or have a cold, most treatments now are superfluous and help the owner’s emotions more than the owner or the pets well-beings. It is proven that “[n]early four hundred thousand pets are now covered by medical insurance policies
in the United States, and that number is expected to grow to two and a half million in the next five years.” In the next five years, the number of insured pets will be about 0.9% as much of insured Americans. Added onto that, nearly 33 million Americans are not insured, which is a reason why I find it ridiculous that two millions pets can be insured but there are still so many Americans that are not. We could be spending those millions of dollars that are used in veterinary hospitals like the one in NYC to help humans who need the money; among the 33 million uninsured Americans, 565,000 homeless Americans, and 795 million malnourished people worldwide, the money could be put to better use. Added to that, “[e]very year, while pets like theirs are saved by the most elaborate means, some six million strays are put to sleep.” If pets truly deserved the same rights that most humans receive but do not actually have, medically and just lawfully, then large numbers of animals would not be put to sleep or killed every year. You can’t just pick and choose, it has to be one way or the other.
Despite all of this, I do understand that pets can be considered family members to many people and it’d be hard to just let them go.
The owner of the cat in The Last Meow “had studied enough psychology to suspect that her feelings for Lady were party misplaced mothering instincts.” Owners feel a connection to their pets that can be portrayed as a friendship or as a parent-child relationship, which is why they want to keep their pets as healthy as possible, because they don’t want to lose someone important to them. Although pets are considered family members to most people, “The rights we grant animals are, first and foremost, a function of empathy…[v]eterinarians like to talk about a pet’s quality of life, but no one really knows what they mean…[d]o they also feel enough pleasure—enough joy in the sheer fact of existence—to make surviving worthwhile?” These owners are putting their pets through all these treatments when these animals could be absolutely miserable. Along with that, veterinarian hospitals have “donor animals” which are simply there to donate organs to other animals. It’d almost be more humane to put them down when they have to be seriously treated since they have no say or consent in the matter. When malpractice lawsuits started coming into play, courts genuinely had to consider whether animals should be treated with these human rights in court, even though pets had no consent to what was done to them in the first place. To make it even more extreme, “[t]he
kitten’s owners had driven in from western Pennsylvania and were paying hundreds of dollars for his treatment. Yet they could have got another kitten for free in any shelter.” Despite the fact that not all animals are the same in personality, there can be a limit to what’s reasonable and unreasonable in the pet-owning lifestyle. If your pet is incredibly sick and in misery, you should end their misery and when you’re ready maybe even buy a new pet. Waiting it out and spending your money in doing so is just hurting you and the pet further.