When is it time to say goodbye to my beloved pet?

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One of the most painful times in my life are those times when I have to send my dog to the Rainbow Bridge.  The decision is the hardest, never knowing if you are doing the right thing.   Is it too soon?  Is there yet hope?  Maybe a new drug?  When all reasonable measures have been exhausted and the time comes our hearts break as we take our best friend for his/her last ride, and our hearts and minds fill with dread as we turn into the vet’s office.

Those eyes, those beautiful eyes, which, for so many years have looked at us with love, laughter, and joy implore our mercy, and yet there is nothing for it.  You hold them tight, sobbing all the while, as the doctor administers that last needle and our friend sleeps forever.  And we weep as we return home and put away the beds, toys, and dishes once enjoyed by our dearest companions and we weep some more.

When I ran across this New York Times article by Jessica Pierce I knew I had to share it.  I hope it helps you decide when it’s time to say goodbye:

ODY died peacefully last year, Nov. 29. He was 14 and a half. Truth be told, Ody didn’t just die. I killed him. I paid a vet to come to my house and inject a chemical solution into a vein in Ody’s back leg.

People ask me how I knew it was time. There was no watershed, but a slow accumulation of miseries. Ody had been in serious decline for six months. Partial paralysis of his laryngeal muscles made it hard for him to breathe, and he would begin to pant at the slightest exertion. His once deep tenor bark had transformed into a raspy Darth Vader croak. The signals from his addled brain often failed to reach his body, so when I walked him he left a Hansel and Gretel trail of pee and poop behind him. His muscles atrophied, and his walk was crab-like and unsteady. He grew increasingly uninterested in food and people, his two great passions. Worst of all, he began falling more and more frequently and was unable to get up by himself.

Toward the end, I would wake in the night to scuffling sounds. I’d search the house and find Ody trapped behind the piano or tangled up in the exercise equipment. It was on the fourth such night that my husband said: “It’s time. We can’t do this to Ody anymore.”

Euthanasia is deeply entrenched in the culture of pet keeping in America, and for the vast majority of companion animals, death will be orchestrated by a human caretaker, the time and date chosen in advance and not, as it were, decided by “nature” or some higher power. Yet despite its ubiquity, we rarely question its moral appropriateness.

Euthanasia is typically thought of as a choice between suffering and death — and, indeed, it can offer relief from unyielding pain. But death is too often prescribed as a de facto treatment for suffering when much less aggressive possibilities exist. We can ease our animals into the valley of death, rather than abruptly shoving them off the cliff.

Pain is the barometer most often used to assess whether an animal should be euthanized, and one of the most important improvements we can make in caring for our pets is to provide them with better palliative care. Untreated or undertreated pain is epidemic among companion animals. Kevin Stafford, an authority on veterinary ethics, estimates that 10 million dogs in the United States suffer from osteoarthritis but that only a small fraction get treatment. Of those dogs that do, he says, many are treated ineffectually or are given too little pain medicine for too short a time. The only treatment many arthritic dogs receive is euthanasia.

Effective and affordable pain treatments for animals are available; many human pain drugs were developed using animals. We can also lessen the pain for ailing pets with structural alterations to our homes, like ramps.

Why, then, are so many animals in pain? The reasons are largely cultural. Some veterinarians, particularly older ones, have been taught that animals don’t feel pain (the same convenient skepticism under which the animal research juggernaut labors). Few vets specialize in palliative care, and treating pain effectively takes a tenacity that harried and underpaid vets may find difficult to muster on a daily basis. And pet owners can be inattentive, even lazy.

To be sure, animal pain can be tricky to recognize and treat. Cats and rabbits are notorious for their so-called stoicism, but dogs, too, may not display pain in ways we easily see. As with humans, responses to pain vary. Effective pain management often requires trial and error with various types of drugs, as well as the use of non-drug therapies like weight management, controlled exercise, physical therapy, massage, acupuncture and nutritional supplements.

Pain must be understood broadly, as it is in human medicine, to include psychological suffering. Ody’s physical ailments were mostly caused by neurological decline. The fact that he wasn’t obviously in physical pain made the decision to euthanize a difficult one, because I was left to make an imperfect judgment about his overall well-being.

Read more from the New York Times…

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About Post Author

Professor Mike

Professor Mike is a left-leaning, dog loving, political junkie. He has written dozens of articles for Substack, Medium, Simily, and Tribel. Professor Mike has been published at Smerconish.com, among others. He is a strong proponent of the environment, and a passionate protector of animals. In addition he is a fierce anti-Trumper. Take a moment and share his work.
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Karl P,
10 years ago

I don’t understand all this paying for petcare stuff.

We used to get through loads of cats at our house ‘cos we lived on a main road. Anyway we had this cat that was sick all the time, it kept being sick so me mum shaved it.

greenlight
11 years ago

Please say I’m not the only one who cried my way through this article?

Bill Formby
Reply to  greenlight
11 years ago

Perhaps not on the outside G.L., but I mourned greatly on the inside. Over the decades I have had to made that decision several rimes and each time I say that I am not going to put myself through it again. We recently lost Garfield, a cat whose picture has been displayed on here before and it was almost beyond what I could go through. My best friend right now Is aging before my eyes and I am already dreading the time when I have to make that decision about him. At my age I may get lucky and he may outlast me, but then I hate to leave that decision in somelse’s hands too.

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