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
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