Woman Gets $800 Vet Bill After Her Dog Eats Roommate's Food, Wonders Who's To Blame

Some dogs are known to have a bottomless pit where a stomach should be. That’s why it’s important to make sure they don’t have easy access to lots of food or snacks.

The redditor u/slomuscletherapist’s pet named Bear is one of such dogs, so she made sure her roommate knew about it. Yet one day Bear found a way to help himself to a feast that resulted in a $800 vet bill, due to the roommate’s negligence. That made the OP wonder if she was a jerk for thinking that the roomie should pay the bill.

There’s never a dull moment when living with a dog, whether it’s constant playtime or constant surveillance. And unless 24/7 monitoring is something the owner enjoys, they might have to find a way to make the environment safe for their pet.

In order to make the house safe for Bear—the beagle with no sense of satiety—his owner made sure he didn’t have easy access to the kitchen. (She also locked the trash cans, since, as quite a few dog owners know, they have no problem digging through the trash, whether out of hunger, boredom, or any other reason, for that matter.) The redditor also made sure that her friends and roommate know about Bear’s lack of restraint.

There is no one clear reason why some dogs seem perpetually hungry. According to PetMD, it could be related to psychological matters, such as anxiety or stress, aging processes, or metabolic and other disorders, among other things. It can also depend on learned behavior, or, as the OP pointed out, even on the dog’s breed.

The redditor suggested that her beagle is a type of breed to eat itself to death, and it’s not one of a kind when it comes to such a problem. According to a South Carolina–based professional dog trainer, others include Labrador and Golden retrievers, dachshunds, pugs, and Rottweilers.

While some dogs simply can’t stop eating or continuously look for something delicious to snack on, others might opt for inedible objects instead. According to the Animal Clinic of Benicia, it’s often related to pica—a common disorder stemming from the dog’s attempt to obtain nutrients it might be lacking. It often leads to canines eating or chewing on such things as shoes, socks, toys, or even sand or rocks in some cases.

This can understandably be pretty dangerous for the pet as items as such are unsuitable to consume and can get stuck in the digestive system. Consequently, it can also result in quite a costly visit to the vet.

Based on American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals’ (ASPCA) data, dog owners spend roughly $410 a year on routine medical care and preventative medication (cat owners typically have to cough up around $300). These expenses do not include the one-time costs of procedures the pup has to go through during its first year, which typically add up to around a thousand dollars (nearly $500 for felines).

The rather costly upkeep of a pet is something owners ought to consider before getting one; so, they can—and should—be expected. But quite often, it’s the unforeseen instances that end up hurting the wallet the most. Forbes revealed that in the recent years—2021 to 2022, to be exact—more than half of pet owners (63%) found it difficult to cover an unexpected vet bill due to inflation. A survey of 2,000 owners found that a bill of $500 would force 28% of owners into debt, while one of nearly a thousand dollars would cause 42% of them to go into debt.

Bear’s surprise vet bill of $800 might have understandably been not an easy one for his owner to cover. That might be one of the reasons she started wondering if the roommate should pay it, considering that she was the one to cause the situation. Such an opinion seemingly split the community into two camps about it, but the OP revealed in the comments that the cost was also split between the two.