Why Pets Are Not Good Gifts

We see lots of Christmas puppies this time of year at the veterinary practice I work at. New pets seem to be popular gifts. But unless you know, with 100% certainty that the recipient of the pet wants and has the ability to care for the pet, it is probably a better idea to choose a different present. Last spring we visited the local animal shelter and were very saddened by the huge influx of rabbits and bunnies they shelter had to take in after Easter.

There are a lot of differences between giving a pet as a gift and giving something else. Pets as gifts are unusual in that they make a lot of demands on the gift recipient that other types of presents do not. To give a pet to someone is to give them something that will demand a great deal of their time and money in the months - or in the case of a cat or dog, or some other pets - years to come. That's placing some serious demands on the receiver of a gift.

New puppies and kittens can be especially expensive. They require a series of vaccinations that spans many weeks until they are 16 to 20 weeks old depending on where you live and the biggest health threats around your area. By the time these series are complete, including dewormings and other routine puppy and kitten preventative health measures, the person who receives the gift will likely spend several hundreds of dollars. Then there is spaying or neutering surgeries, that will again be in the hundreds of dollars for most new pets. Food, training classes, beds, litter pans, and scratching posts all add into what the new owner will have to pay for as well.

The cost to buy a puppy or a kitten as a gift to someone else is actually the smallest cost associated with owning that new pet.

Where and when I think giving a pet as a gift can work, are in cases such as when a family had decided that they are ready to have a pet, but the parents decide to time the arrival of the new pet (that they would be getting anyway) with a holiday or birthday. They knowingly are taking on all the additional expense and labor involved with getting a new pet onto themselves, not placing that burden onto someone else.