Americans spend about $75 billion annually on their pets, covering food, toys, clothing and veterinary care. The typical dog owner can expect to pour thousands into taking care of their pet over its lifetime.
But expenditures don’t necessarily reflect a dog’s true value. Owners, many of whom consider their pets to be part of the family, might be inclined to answer that a dog’s life is priceless.
But, as The Washington Post reports, for economists tasked with the unfortunate work of coming up with cost-benefit analyses for things like pet food regulation and wrongful canine death lawsuits, “priceless” doesn’t cut it. They need hard numbers.
So we arrive at a paper recently published in the journal Benefit-Cost Analysis, titled “Monetizing Bowser: A Contingent Valuation of the Statistical Value of Dog Life.” The paper attempts to quantify what the authors call the “value of statistical dog life,” or VSDL, following a widely accepted method for putting a price tag on a typical human life.
For the study, the authors asked nearly 5,000 dog owners about their willingness to pay for a hypothetical vaccine that would reduce their dog’s risk of death from a particular canine virus from 12% to 2% in a given year. By running the math they found that a dog’s life would be worth about $10,000.
This value could be used, for example, if a proposed regulation cost $1 million to implement and was expected to save the lives of 1,000 dogs, you could think of it as a good investment, because the value of those canine lives ($10 million) is much greater than the cost of the regulation. Read the full story.
