Do I really need to bring my cat to the vet every year?

The short answer:

Yes. Veterinarians, including myself, recommend that you bring your cat to the doctor every year. While the cost and time savings of skipping a year may seem attractive in the short term, cats that are seen annually experience a better quality of life and simply live longer.  Regardless of whether they are indoor-only or indoor/outdoor cats, the risks of foregoing a checkup are too great to skip it. 

Why doctors recommend an annual visit.

Your cat can’t tell you he’s sick.

Imagine every day of your life walking around with a head-splitting, nauseating, debilitating hangover. Your family never asks — “are you ok?” — because you purposefully hide your illness from them. This is what kidney disease is like for a cat.

Doctors recommend annual visits to detect kidney disease and the myriad other illnesses that your cat may be suffering from, but can’t tell you about. Worse yet, cats evolved to hide their illness, which means they may be hurting and you don’t even realize it.

Cats who see vets annually live longer.

Just like you should see a human doctor every year to stay healthy, so too should your cat see the vet. When you make an annual visit, your veterinarian can get out ahead of potentially chronic diseases. In this way, she can lessen their severity or prevent them altogether.

To show just how important annual visits are to your cat’s health, we examined 10 years of our own medical records. Our findings indicate that clients who make time for checkups and follow-ups get an average of three more years with their cats.

Your cat’s health can change a lot in a year.

Cats age four years for every one human year. That means, in the span of 12 months, your cat’s state of health can make significant shifts. Compared to humans, their hearts beat faster, and they breathe more often. Some scientists believe this creates additional ‘wear and tear’ on their biological systems, making annual checkups that much more important. 

It costs less.

There are far more low-cost options for treating an early diagnosis of kidney disease than there are when saving a patient in kidney failure. It is also a lot less painful for your furry family member. According to Nationwide Pet Insurance data, infectious diseases that are not caught early end up costing 8 times more than those caught with routine preventative care.

**Data visualized from Nationwide Pet Insurance study.

The risks of putting off a checkup

Your kitty may be suffering and you don’t know.

To protect themselves from predators in the wild, cats have learned to hide the fact that they are sick. Unfortunately, they extend this evolutionary habit to the safety of our homes and end up hiding their illness from us. So unless you know what to look for, you may be living with an uncomfortable, sick cat and have no idea.

If they are developing a chronic disease, your treatment options may be limited.

In general, the longer a disease goes untreated in your cat, the fewer options there are to fix it, and the more those options cost. For example, if your cat has gained 2 pounds in the last year (about 30 lbs for a human), there are a bevy of dietary or exercise changes I can prescribe to help shed the weight. If, however, their weight gain goes unchecked for years and they develop diabetes, daily insulin is pretty much your only option. And insulin costs more than exercise.

Your cat’s disease may be past treatment.

One of the worst parts of being a Vet is telling people that their loved one’s disease is too far along for treatment. Sometimes it’s a congenital defect that the cat was born with and there’s nothing that we could do, but sometimes it’s something we could have treated if it had been caught years ago. The treatable cases are regrettable and a real risk for cats who don’t get preventative care.

You may not be correctly managing an existing chronic disease.

As mentioned in the previous section, cats’ health requirements can shift significantly over the course of a year. Unfortunately, this means the dosage of medication or treatment that your Vet prescribed a year ago may be ineffective today. The best way to know that your furry family member isn’t careening off course is with an annual checkup.

Your cat may be contracting/spreading a preventable disease.

Finally, and especially if you have an outdoor cat, annual checkups give you an opportunity to keep your cat up-to-date on their vaccinations. Without these, your kitty may contract a fatal virus like feline leukemia, FIV, or rabies and spread it throughout your community. 

Set up your annuals. They matter!

As I hope I have shown throughout this article, annual cat checkups are important, so don’t skip them. Most vets will send you a reminder every year when you’re due, but I recommend going a step further. Keep a recurring reminder in your digital calendar, circle and bedazzle the date on your physical calendar, or best of all, set up your next annual while you’re still in the office at this year’s. Do what you can to make the scheduling as effortless as possible to increase your likelihood of follow through. 

If you’re Cat Doctor client, you can set up an appointment here. 

Most importantly, for the well being and continued quality of life for your loved one, see your vet every year. Maybe even twice.