Cats and dogs, soul mates of countless people.

How much do people nowadays love their furry children? Not only do you have to keep an eye on your work and walk after get off work, but sometimes you can even grit your teeth and bear it when you have a cold or a fever, but once the hairy child becomes weak, you must hurry to the hospital to see what's going on.

However, when you walk out of the hospital with your pet with peace of mind and look at the bills in your hand, do you also have such questions, "Why is pet treatment so expensive?"

Cats and dogs enter the hospital, but there is no one thousand that cannot be obtained. Taking pets to see a doctor is not what you think is expensive alone.

Data from the "2021 China Pet Industry White Paper" shows that in 2021, the expensive pets to see a doctor will crush the quality of pets and pet products at a ratio of 55%, which has become the biggest pain point for every poop shoveler.

As long as you have a pet, you will know how helpless and unwilling it is to give all the hard-earned money you have earned to the pet hospital.

In 2018, someone's kitten just had a cold, but the doctor prescribed nearly 1,000 yuan of medicine. If you look closely at the bill, you will find that the cold anti-inflammatory medicine is 150 yuan, the 2.5g anti-viral anti-inflammatory cream is 150 yuan, and the eye cleaning medicine is 200 yuan. . You should know that cold anti-inflammatory drugs are only a few dozen yuan for treatment. But for pets, if you don’t accept this 1,000 yuan, you can’t help it if you don’t spend it.

Not only that, someone's cat has a bloody stool. The owner ran around and then took a blood test in the hospital. He paid a few hundred yuan to the doctor with the test form, and got the sentence "Maybe he had eaten too much."

In fact, for most Chinese pet families, spending hundreds,100 to a pet hospital has become the norm. About 80.8% of pet hospitals in China have average customer unit prices in the two ranges of 200 to 500 yuan and 500 to 1,000 yuan. Two-thirds of pet owners spend more than 1,000 yuan in pet medical care and health care.

This is true for ordinary patients. If the pet at home wants to undergo surgery, it will be even worse.

A reporter visited five well-known pet hospitals in Beijing. The price gap for the operation of female cat sterilization can range from 398 yuan to 1,688 yuan, with the maximum price difference reaching 1,290 yuan.

Even if you buy a sterilized luxury package for your kitten group, when you really walk out of the pet hospital, you will find that this offer has long been offset by other additional items. Some people bought a sterilization package for 685.5 yuan for their cats, but the additional blood routine, blood clotting test, cat heart disease test and even a 27 yuan headgear made the actual payment soar to 2011.5 yuan.

More and more people keep pets, bringing pets to medical treatment has also brought double burdens of money and spirituality to many shovelers. So, why is it so expensive to treat pets? Where did the money you spent go?

Why is it so expensive to take a pet to see a doctor? In fact, most people’s first perception of the expensiveness of seeing a pet comes from that long bill.

At a glance, the high drug prices, imported brands, and not reimbursed... All of this made the shovelers begin to doubt their lives: Are kittens and puppies more "priced" than humans?

In fact, to some extent, pets are really "priced" than you think. Especially when taking pet medicine, many people call it outrageous.

Take the nerve-soothing drug gabapentin as an example. The drug used on the platform costs between 20 and 50 yuan, while the gabapentin for cats is concentrated at 50 to 100 yuan or even higher. Although human medication and pet medication cannot be confused, both are gabapentin, the xylitol contained in human medication may cause more discomfort for kittens and puppies.

However, it is not unreasonable to use medicine for pets, after all, "scarcity is precious." Data shows that in 2016, the domestic pet medicine market accounted for only 8% of the entire animal medicine market. Even by 2021, the market size of pet medicines will be only 7 billion, accounting for only 12.7% of the pet medical industry.

Not only that, for most pharmaceutical companies, the development of pet medicines is also a high investment and long-term process. Industry research shows that it may take 5-15 years to promote an animal health drug from the initial concept to the market, and the cost of investment may even exceed $100 million. For pharmaceutical companies, it will take at least 17 years to achieve the cost from the release of the patent.

Therefore, for many pharmaceutical companies, investing in pet medicine is a difficult thing to quickly gain profits. Especially domestic medical companies start late, so you will find that pet hospitals mainly use imported drugs, which is another reason why pet drugs are expensive.

Taking vaccines as an example, the proportion of domestic pet vaccine imports in 2019 reached 94%. Taobao's sales data in April 2021 showed that only three of the top 10 brands with online sales were domestic, and the sales of foreign brands even reached tens of millions of yuan.

So, when we took the cats to see a doctor, our choice of drugs is actually very small, and most of the drugs are imported drugs, so the prices naturally soared.

Of course, putting aside the reason why pet medications are expensive, no insurance reimbursement will make it worse for you, who is not rich.

In fact, the reason why the price of ordinary people who go to see a doctor is not too expensive is that they can reimburse one or two with medical insurance. Taking urban employees in Beijing as an example, the maximum reimbursement of outpatient clinics can reach 90%. However, pets who do not participate in insurance have no chance of reimbursement..

According to Swiss Re's survey data, Sweden is the earliest and most developed country with the pet insurance industry. The pet insurance rate is above 50%, the pet insurance rate in the UK is about 25%, and the pet insurance coverage rate in China is less than 1%. This means that the vast majority of Chinese people are treating their pets in full.

The key to the low pet insurance rate is that the domestic pet insurance mechanism is like the pet medical industry, and they are still paced at the beginning. If you are not careful, you will step on the wrong side.

In 2021, someone bought a pet insurance for their poodle. But this insurance was wasted. It cost 400 yuan to take your own dog to see a doctor, but only 30 yuan was reimbursed. The insurance company's explanation is that the two diarrhea drugs in the bill do not fall within the scope of claims. Some drugs do not count as "drugs" defined by insurance, and some drugs are "nutritional products", and these are not within the scope of claims.

The immature pet insurance system will make many shovelers feel lonely when they buy it. Not only do they have to pay insurance every month, but they can’t pay much money when they are really sick. It’s better to endure the pain at one time and just pay for the full amount of medical treatment.

Pets are expensive to see, so you can't just blame the hospitals for

However, just when you look at the bills like flowing and think that pet hospitals are making a fortune, you may not have imagined that it is difficult for pet hospitals to balance income and expenditure today, and many pet hospitals are even losing money.

The "2021 Pet Medical Industry White Paper" data shows that only nearly 16% of hospitals have a profit margin of more than 30%, and one in ten pet hospitals are in a loss-making state. Although it costs several thousand to go to a pet hospital once, for pet hospitals, the number of visits a day may be only one or two orders, which is simply not enough to make ends meet.

Since pet hospitals do not make money, we spend a lot of money every time we go to the hospital. Pets are expensive to see a doctor. Why?

In fact, the expensiveness of pets is inseparable from people's increasingly refined care for pets. If pets in the past were "good friends" who guarded the house, now, pets are more regarded as "family members" with blood thicker than water. You will find that the behavior of sloppy and carelessness of pets has long disappeared.

In particular, many changes have occurred in veterinary medicine in diagnosis, treatment and care in the past decade. Magnetic resonance, ultrasound, and laparoscopy, which used to be used only in humans, are now used to treat pets.

Data from the American Veterinary Association show that in 2016, the cost of a dog and a cat was $168 and $141, respectively, while in 2022, the price increased to $192 and $169, respectively.

Of course, it is not just about seeing a doctor, but about the delicate care of the shovelers for the hairy children is reflected in all aspects. The report "2020 Pet Medical Consumption Insights" shows that more and more shovelers have even begun to stock up on health care products for pets for gastrointestinal conditioning, calcium and bone replenishment, and hair care.

It is with the efforts of every poop shoveler that the living environment of pets has become better and the life span has been longer. Over the past 40 years, dogs have doubled their life expectancy, while domestic cats have twice as long as wild cats.

However, it sounds like a good thing to grow your pet's life span, but at the same time it breaks the life span determined by natural evolution. Under the normal life span evolution of species, species evolution will have a balance between tumor suppression mechanisms and aging mechanisms. The sudden increase in life span will make it impossible for pets to quickly reset their cancer disorders, thereby increasing the risk of illness. According to the American Veterinary Association, about one-quarter of dogs develop tumors at some stage of their lives. Almost half of dogs over 10 years old will develop cancer. If dogs are unfortunately suffering from cancer, they will have to pay more.

Cornell University data shows that the cost of treatment for pets after cancer may cost more than hundreds of dollars, the cost of subsequent major surgery may cost more than $500, and the cost of chemotherapy can range from hundreds to thousands of dollars.

The sudden increase in life span will break the law of natural evolution, thereby increasing the risk of pets being sick / Picture Bug Creativity

Therefore, the increasing age of pets, the increase in the risk of illness, and the high treatment costs, which in turn makes every shoveler want to protect their hairy children in the preventive stage.

At this time, all you can do is to make continuous prevention in the early stage and often take your pet to check. And spending money has undoubtedly become the best way to seek peace of mind.

But after all, no matter how much money we spend in a pet hospital, we knew from the moment we kept pets, that this was the path we had to go. For every shoveler, of course, they hope that their children will be healthy and stay with them for a longer time.

Although the bill is expensive, it will empty your wallet. But you know that the happiness and companionship brought to you by your own furry children can’t buy it no matter how much you make.