Chemotherapy, Dialysis, Pacemakers: All Part of Dog’s Life Today : Medicine: Pet owners can choose among such specialists as dermatologists, oncologists and cardiologists to perform high-tech veterinary services.

After owning and loving her dog, Tascha, for 12 years, Dawn Schneider had to decide whether to try to save her life.

Tascha, a black English cocker spaniel, wasn’t expected to live for long unless she underwent a radical mastectomy. Schneider said yes to the surgery.

It was a decision Schneider repeated two more times last year after veterinarians found growths on the dog’s other breasts and then its kidney.

The operations did extend Tascha’s life. They also relieved Schneider and her family, but left her wallet about $1,800 lighter. She dreads another pet health care crisis.

“I view her as part of my family. I can’t not do something. I couldn’t live with the guilt if I didn’t do everything I could,” she said.

As medical technology grows, pet owners face an array of sophisticated--and expensive--procedures: dialysis for dogs, cat chemotherapy and even pet pacemakers.

Almost always, the procedures are performed without insurance. While ailing Old Yellers were taken behind the barn and shot, today’s pet owners face tougher choices.

“It’s not only an issue of how much you love your pet, but how much you can afford,” Schneider said.

No hard numbers for medical procedures exist; however, the number of veterinarians in the United States grew by 49% during the 1980s to 65,767, according to the American Veterinary Medical Assn.

Pet owners can choose among such specialists as dermatologists, oncologists and cardiologists to perform high-tech services.

Dialysis is performed on dogs who damage their kidneys lapping up anti-freeze, hip replacements are made for old and fragile-boned purebreds and CAT scans are performed on cancerous cats.

About 1,000 U.S. dog and cat owners, for instance, annually choose to fit their pets with pacemakers, and even more choose open-heart surgery, according to Dr. Larry Tilly, a veterinarian cardiologist in Santa Fe, N.M.

Ailing animals can have their lives extended up to one or two years with pacemakers costing as little as $500, compared to the $10,000 to $15,000 their owners must pay for their own, Tilly said.

Many of the pacemakers in pets are models previously used by humans. Tilly, in fact, supplies his fellow vets with used pacemakers he gets from other medical institutions.

Most other pet care procedures are a bargain when compared to the same procedures performed on humans, largely because pet insurance isn’t widely available.

People with brain tumors might be charged $35,000 for treatment, but the same procedures could be done on a cat for $1,000, said Steven Withrow, a veterinarian in charge of clinical oncology at Colorado State University.

Withrow’s clinic attracts desperate pet owners from across the United States and other countries, but he said he must be able to offer relatively inexpensive treatments because of the lack of insurance.

“The market just won’t bear the same prices that human physicians get away with,” Withrow said. “Part of the job in veterinary medicine is we have to be in the position to offer the Cadillac of care, but we also offer the used Volkswagen.”

Of course, veterinarians also offer the ultimate cost-cutting product their colleagues who work on humans can’t: euthanasia. The old ace-in-the-hole of veterinary care will always be around, but experts say even that choice has become more complex.

Bernard Rollin, a professor of philosophy and physiology at Colorado State who studies attitudes toward animals, said people have become much more emotionally attached to their pets.

“When I got started (more than 15 years ago), the idea that there was grief for a pet was ludicrous. You’d get responses like, ‘It’s a dog, get another dog,’ ” Rollin said.

Today, emotionally charged situations like Michelle Cobey’s of Seattle are the norm. Cobey recalls how it took her days to decide to end the life of Mac, a scruffy black stray cat she took into her home. After a few years, Mac’s kidneys began failing. Eventually, Cobey decided not to pay for dialysis.

“My choice was to spend $500 or $600 dollars to do some things that might help him, but might not,” Cobey said. “It was very, very difficult. I kept wanting somebody to tell me what to do.”

Every veterinarian has war stories about anguished families engaging in a grim calculus that evaluates the pet’s quality of life, the owners’ emotions and the costs.

Dr. Ronald Scharf, who practices outside Schenectady, said the problem is especially acute for poorer families, who might sometimes literally have to choose between shoes for the children or drugs for the dog.

“People of limited financial opportunities might be more of the mind to put the animal down,” Scharf said.

Highlighting their differences with doctors, many veterinarians consider euthanasia “a gift” that can put an animal out of its misery. A doctor who does that for one of his human patients can be charged with murder.