How much do we love our pets? That can be a hard question to quantify. After all, our pets bring us so much snuggly joy each and every day. But the folks at Honest Paws decided to put some numbers to some facts about pets and their owners. And these aren’t just any survey questions--they’re tough! The questions focused on sacrifices that pet owners would make in various aspects of their lives in favor of keeping their pets around.
What Food Would You Give Up?
Has anyone ever asked you whether you’d give up junk food in order to keep your pet? It’s an odd question, but Honest Paws asked it. And they found that 96 percent of those surveyed would give up chips, cheesy puffs, ice cream cones, and cookies if they had to give up junk food in order to keep their pet.
The same percentage of people would give up drinking alcohol before they’d ever let go of their beloved pet. Nearly three-quarters of people would choose to give their pet food instead of themselves if it came right down to it. Those are some dedicated pet parents!
Relationships Vs. Your Pet
The Honest Paws survey also asked pet parents about giving up relationships for their pets. More than half (56 percent) of the respondents would pick their pet over a partner who wasn’t a fan of the pet. And there are some gender differences here, with 64 percent of females saying they’d ditch the relationship.
A smaller but still significant number of female respondents, at 30 percent, told Honest Paws they’d break up with a partner that their pet didn’t care for. One-quarter of respondents would ditch a friend or family member if their pet didn’t like that person.
Blockchain and Pet Health
Honest Paws also found out that 83 percent of the participants would go get an extra job to pay for their pet’s healthcare, if necessary.
Clearly, people will go to great lengths to keep their pets in their lives. And a 2020 study shows that blockchain technology may be able to help improve things within the medical industry for pets. The study authors note that there can be problems with “the authenticity and timeliness of information interaction” when it comes to pet medical care.
They concluded that blockchain technology has the potential to bring about some solutions to these problems. One example is that blockchain could provide a way to share pets’ medical information between different medical providers.
This represents multiple benefits because blockchain tends to make data sharing much safer. Therefore, that info will also stay confidential because of that enhanced security. And while you may not care if someone knows what medical care your pet receives, you may care if someone were able to see how much money you’ve spent on your pet’s medical bills. So, blockchain could help safeguard all of that information.
The study also notes that using blockchain in the pet medical industry would greatly reduce the number of illegal pet hospitals--those that don’t have a license or aren’t properly certified.
Plus, blockchain technology has been used in other industries to ensure the authenticity of information. A great example of this is within the food industry where blockchain is deployed to track food from farm to grocer to table.
Blockchain certainly shows promise within the pet medical care industry, as noted in the study. But it has yet to be widely adopted.
Caring for Our Pets
It’s pretty obvious that pet owners love their pets and will do just about anything to keep them safe and healthy--even at the expense of relationships. As pet owners, hopefully in the near future we can look forward to safer, more transparent medical care for our pets thanks to blockchain.
