Economic modelling can put a price on a dog’s life

According to the current calculations of the Cambridge University Press, a dog’s life is worth about $10,000. UW-Madison Professor David Weimer’s paper used a technique that is already used in humans. That technique calculates the value of life from a statistical point of view.

Calculating the value of a dog’s life can be a complicated task, but a recent study has finally attempted to do so. In economics, the value of statistical life is a way to measure how much it would cost to make something safer. As an example, if a person feels they deserve a raise because they would die twice as often in another job, then their extra salary is the value of statistical life. When judging whether the cost of making something safer is worth it, economists must consider this limit.

It turns out that on average, the typical adult in the U.S. values their own life at around $10 million, an amount that has been verified through hundreds of studies. There are two big things that determine how much you value your life: the opportunity cost and present value. Dogs can’t make their own financial decisions, so figuring out the value of their life is difficult. Until recently, no one had bothered to do the math.

The FDA has run into a big problem. They need an estimate for the value of life of pets. To do this, they need to know how much it matters to people that their pets are healthy. And if they want to regulate pet food safety, they need to have the estimate for the value of dog and cat life.

In a type of survey called contingent valuation, the researcher, Professor David Weimer, was able to assign economic value. He thought that we all love our dogs, and we want to keep them as healthy as possible. But what if we were presented with a hypothetical scenario about canine influenza? Our dogs would have a 12% chance of contracting the disease and dying. But we can make it two percent if we buy the vaccine. Respondents, all dog owners, were asked how they would respond to this and answered with a bid on the vaccine.

Utilizing some basic math and controlling for income, Weimer calculated that $6,760 as a conservative estimate for what the typical dog owner values the life of their dog at. This number quickly rises if computations are done in plausible ways and is higher if the person sees the dog as a family member rather than just an animal. Out of these calculations, Weimer decided that $10,000 is a good average for how much the typical dog owner values their pet.

Weimer’s article on wrongful death of a pet has caused some pet lawyers to be interested in the paper. In some states, if your dog is wrongfully killed, you might only be entitled to the price of a new one. What’s the value of a shelter dog? Essentially zero.

Though we can’t really quantify the emotional support dogs provide to humans, we know they’re worth more than a dollar. People view their pets as family and having a value for dog life is useful. Thousands of years of domestication have created the perfect playmate for us. In this era, dogs are used in therapy, proving they’re more valuable than any dollar amount.