The Canine Cost of Living

202 – March, 2010

by Chris Robinson

I have a friend who periodically sends me bits of trivia on the theory that there is not enough useless clutter fogging my brain. Buried in last week’s edition (A rat can last longer without water than a camel; every person has a unique tongue print; Daniel Boone detested coonskin caps) was something that not only caught my eye but provided an answer for why my checking account frequently teeters on the brink of insolvency.

According to this latest trivia missive, the cost of keeping a large dog, and I have three of them, is about $3,000 per year. While the email contained no definitive proof for this number, I suspect it is probably accurate. Since one of my dogs suffers from digestive problems and requires a special diet apparently personally prepared by Emeril Lagasse, which sells, per bag, for just slightly less than the national debt, the cost of keeping him in the manner to which he has become accustomed is probably double that figure. That means if all three reach the age of eleven and setting aside the extra costs associated with feeding and medicating Bob, I have nearly $100,000 worth of dogs. This is not an investment but rather an out-of-pocket expense.

Dog expenses are like poison ivy. They creep up on you and cause an agonizing itch in your checkbook. A few years ago, my tax return was audited by the Internal Revenue Service, an experience that ranked on the misery index well above a week I spent in survival school with some Navy and Marine Corps pilots shortly after I graduated from college which, prior to the IRS audit, had been at the very top of my personal misery list. The woman who conducted the inquisition had just finished treating my travel expenses like they were written by someone failing a high school fiction writing class when she came to the dog expenses. As a writer for dog magazines, I consider the dogs to be “tools of the trade” and I claim deductions for things like dog food, vet expenses, stud fees, entry fees, handler fees, treats, toys and hunting trips. I knew this was going to be a worse-than-average ordeal when the IRS auditor looked up from my tax form and said, “I don’t like dogs. I’m a cat person.”

Uh oh! This was not going to be fun. Once, in the course of doing my other real job as investigative reporter, I had to visit the federal prison in Leavenworth, KS to interview an inmate about a gang of grain thieves operating throughout the Midwest. While the interview was generally unproductive, the prison itself made an indelible impression on me especially after I had to go through six locked, barred doors to get to the area where I was to interview the inmate. When I returned from that trip, I remarked to a friend of mine who was an Assistant United States Attorney, that the minute I stepped off the plane, I had called my accountant and told him to recheck my last tax return. After all, they nailed both Al Capone and Leona Helmsley for tax evasion and Leavenworth, definitely, was not the sort of accommodations that “The Queen of Mean” would have considered acceptable. Peering over her half glasses with an icy stare, the IRS agent said frostily, “I see that you’ve claimed $7,500 for dog expenses. How do you justify that kind of expense?”

As this had been a year when I had five dogs, one of which was being specialed both in the U.S. and Canada and running in hunt tests in both countries, another that was working on his championship in both countries as well as running in hunt tests and two others that were doing hunt tests, one of which was competing in these events both north and south of the border, I anticipated some questions about this expense. So, as a precaution, I had not only brought along canceled checks and receipts but also the dogs’ registration papers, title certificates and several copies of magazines which contained photos of my dogs carrying birds, sitting among decoys, frozen on point or posed on a podium with a spiffily clad handler and a smiling judge holding a rosette.

“Dog ownership is a necessity if you are a dog writer,” I said. “Farmers have tractors and combines, carpenters write off expenses for hammers, saws and the like, I have hunting dogs. It’s the same thing.”

Giving me the kind of look Martha Stewart would reserve for someone who brought a sack of burgers from McDonald’s or tacos from Taco John’s to one of her dinner parties, the IRS agent grudgingly said, “Well, I guess I’ll allow it. It must be a business because no one in their right mind would spend that kind of money on something that wasn’t producing income. I can’t imagine anyone spending that much money on cats!” It clearly required all of her self-discipline and restraint to keep from holding my tax forms between two fingers at arm’s length while, with the other hand, she held her nose.

I didn’t think that was a prudent time to explain that one of the higher vet bills resulted from an encounter with an enormous feral cat hunting the same birds as the dogs and I. The cat took umbrage at the competition and attacked one of my bird dogs. While the cat ultimately did not survive the battle, it definitely went down swinging utilizing every weapon at its disposal including a barbed wire fence and the cost to repair the damage to the dog made it comfortably into three figures.

Putting aside from the occasional heart-palpitating, cold-sweat-inducing contact with the IRS, owning a dog is a major league drain on the budget. Not only are the dogs themselves a significant expense but the equipment needed to outfit them is at least as expensive as having two kids as youth hockey goalies. There are beeper collars, electronic training collars, dummies, dummy launchers, wingers, collars, leashes, bird releasers and the training birds themselves. My electronic dog training equipment is so technologically advanced it probably could compete with that found on the USS New Hampshire, the newest of the Virginia-class attack submarines in the U.S. Navy. Certainly it cost about as much.

Then there are the vet bills. Have you ever wondered why dog owners hobble around moaning in pain like crippled Crimean war veterans? It’s because they don’t have enough money left to get these things fixed after they pay the vet bills for their dogs. When one of the dogs tangles with a porcupine, it’s “Hello, veterinarian, goodbye orthopedist.”

The dog in my pack who suffers from digestive upsets has made uncountable visits to his friendly veterinarian who has become ever more friendly after enjoying numerous vacations in exotic locales on the fees she has collected from his many appearances in her waiting room. The last time, she paused midway through her examination, to tell her receptionist to book another mid-winter trip to Hawaii or perhaps even Fiji depending upon how serious this bout of digestive distress proved to be.

He has to have a diet of special food to keep the problem under some semblance of control and I should have realized this was going to be pricey when the delivery vehicle for the food arrived and it was a Ferrari. He eats the equivalent of Wagyu beef smothered in white truffles and Beluga caviar while my plate holds franks and beans. When I show up at the vet’s office to buy another bag of his food, the receptionist smiles and tosses another brochure on the delights of the French Riviera into the vet’s inbox.

Another of my other dogs has a serious dentist-chair mentality about trips to the vet. She puts on the brakes at the door and it requires only slightly less power than is needed to get a fully loaded, 100-car coal train rolling to get her underway again. But that is just the beginning. She is strong enough to tow a 747 back onto the runway after an overshoot without stopping to pant but let her catch sight of a hypodermic needle and it is like she’s facing open-heart surgery without an anesthetic. It usually takes three Olympic gold-medalist weight-lifters to hold her down for a shot and she shrieks the entire time. It’s a wonderful advertisement for the vet and her dog-side compassion. When this dog gets a shot, dog owners all over town start flipping through the Yellow Pages looking for alternative health care for their dogs. I suspect the vet would prefer that the dog be taken somewhere else for her shots, like maybe Outer Mongolia.

The last time we visited the veterinarian, she asked when I planned to get a new puppy. Her kids are approaching college age and she wants to be sure there is enough money for them to attend George Washington University or Sarah Lawrence College without having to forego regular tickets to the south sea islands. Since the youngest dogs occupying my couch are not yet three years old, given the costs they have already incurred, she may not have to choose between sparkling lagoons and a sparkling education.

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Posted by admin on Feb 24 2011. Filed under Editorial, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.