Dying naturally tends to be an excruciatingly painful and slow process.

eating, drinking water, moving out of the way of danger, etc.

Not eating and drinking is a definite thing.

I waited too long and regret it every single day. Every single day. He could have fallen asleep in my lap after a entire day of treats, cuddles and hanging out. Instead he had a seizure and hit his head and died whining in agony on the ride to the emergency vet at 3 in the morning. Every memory I have of him, over the span of 16 wonderful years now exists alongside this extremely traumatic experience.

We made the call when our dog had cancer and couldn’t walk anymore. It was the right call. We wanted to maximise his good life and minimise his suffering. From his point of view, he got lots of pats and treats and then peacefully went to sleep. There was no pain or panic. He lived a good life.

I waited too long for my little lady, she didn’t need to suffer as long as she did. It sucks either way.

It’s hard as hell, but for me it comes down to this: we have to decide if they’re suffering so much that death would be a relief for them. Since we don’t have a common language, all we can do is go by what other signs and indicators are available. I don’t entirely trust veterinarians to make that decision, because in the past it has seemed to me that they tend to err on the side of euthanasia.

I’ve done it both ways. Either way, it hurts.

I work at a wildlife rehab clinic. Just a guess, but we probably euthanize more animals than any vet, since for people to be able to catch and bring us wild animals, they are typically much worse off than most domestic animals. A third of patients are dead by the time they get here, or shortly after. The next third, we will have to euthanize within a few hours or days. That’s a lot.

We don’t do it because they are too hard to work on or anything like that. Our only goal is to return animals to the wild and have them survive. We try some far-out things sometimes to make that happen, and since most of us work for free, we do it because we love animals and want to see them survive.

I just attended a conference talk about the topic of animal suffering. It wasn’t specifically labeled as a talk about euthanasia, but it ended up being a large part of it, and attending made me feel a bit better about it.

When we’re treating animals, it’s like a balancing scale. We have their health conditions, stress levels, etc on one side, and we have our treatments and stress mitigating factors on the other. Ideally, we can either balance the scales or tilt them positive. But as time goes on, and if things are not improving, or get worse, even if we can stack more and more positive responses on the other side, that is still a lot of weight on the scale. It wouldn’t take a big nudge to make it crash. Or the negative side is stacking up and the positives have no chance to keep up or reverse things.

All this time, the animal is not living the life it was meant to live. Out in the wild, hunting, mating, etc for my animals, or being a happy, lazy, snacking, sunbeam soaking friend to you that a domestic animal should. And animals hide pain as a survival reflex. If they are sick or injured, they are always hurting more than you know, because they don’t want to be seen as that slowest wildebeest in the pack that the lions are chasing.

And the point of the lecture was this: no matter how hopeless the stack of negatives is, there is one thing that is guaranteed to instantly alleviate that pain and suffering. Euthanasia is not a positive or negative, but should be looked at as neutral, a zero point. No points on the positive side of the scale, but the negative side is swept clean. If you can do nothing to help your animal, or if the treatment itself is making their life miserable, you have the ability to take that stress and pain away. When to do that is an ethical question with no concrete answer. We address each case on an individual basis and come to consensus as a group. With your pet, that is you and your family. Are you keeping them alive because the animal is still happy or because you aren’t ready to let go to a hopeless cause?

I’ve tried to treat my pets, 2 of which died of failing organs, and for my cat, it was clear the treatment was making her suffer, and for my dog, she eventually has a seizure. Those were where I had to say to myself that what I was continuing to do was only for my sake, and it wasn’t helping me, and was certainly not going to help them. Looking back though, if I would have euthanized them a week or 2 sooner, I probably could have spared them days of pain, and I regret being what I consider to have been selfish acts.

Especially with a dog (I was not a dog person, but the death of my 2 dogs both crushed me immensely due to that pack bond they have with you as opposed to more independent cats) it can be hard to make the call. But when you learn they are that sick and are likely going to crash soon, don’t try to prolong that time, but do spoil the shit out of that dog. Take them on extra walks if they can. Take them to beautiful and smelly places like a state park or a sunset walk along water and walk extra slow so they can enjoy it in their dog ways. Feed them all the stuff they always wanted but wasn’t good for them. And when they start to not enjoy even that spoiling anymore, know you gave them the best life they could have dreamed, and accept that ultimate responsibility you took when you committed yourself to that dog the day you brought it into your home and made it part of your pack.

I hope that was helpful. I gave up having pets because it was hard to do that last step so many times. Now I work with wild animals and see death all the time, but it is less personal, so it is easier to see the positive/negative balance because it isn’t clouded by an emotional bond. No one wants to say goodbye to a loved one, human or pet, but it is a certainty of life, and because we live life at a different scale than they do (unless you have parrots, tortoises, etc!) that time is never going to feel like enough, even if you could keep that dog alive for 50 years. The length of their healthy days we have no say over, but we can keep the sad days to a minimum.

i know an independent cat rescue that will take injured animals and never euthanize due to buddhist principals. you would not believe the depth of suffering i have seen.

It is a necessary evil and a shame we do not do it to humans.

My last dog was a member of my family for 12 years. He was my other son and the joy he brought my family was without measure. In his 11th year he blew out his ACL and three months later I/the vet discovered that he had developed bone cancer.

I was not going to subject him too either of those treatments. So he got two shots, I lied on the floor of the vets office and cried my eyes out as he quietly slipped away.

Until those meds started to take effect he was living a life of pain and that ended it.

My father is 94 years old. He has three PHDs and had a towering intellect and I have shelf of books that he has written to prove it. Now his corpse is walking around trying to shit and piss his pants. Not too long ago, with no prep, he could lecture for three hours on a subject. Now he can’t order a lunch sandwich without getting lost in the subject matter and worse he FUCKING knows it. It is just so miserable to watch.

He is not going to get better.

It is time.

I’ve known pets that had lost their owners and just stopped eating. They got super depressed, lost the will to go on, and let themselves slip away.

I had to put my dog down a few years ago. He was in late stages of kidney failure. He probably wasn’t going to live more than a few more days anyway. I spent the entire day with him, gave him everything he could want.

It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Even thinking about him years later still brings me to major tears.

You’ve missed a few critical elements.

Firstly, pets can’t reason, don’t understand what’s happening to them, and the worst part - aren’t able to minimise their own suffering. For example, I lived with a dog that had quite advanced cancer in one leg. Every time he got up he would hurt himself. The leg just couldn’t support his weight but he couldn’t not put it down. He had cancer in other parts of his body as well.

Secondly, lots of people are just unable to provide the high level of end of life care that an animal like that needs. Like, if you need to go to work every day, you just can’t be there to carry your dog every where they need to go, and make sure they don’t hurt themselves. There’s no social security for pets, they haven’t worked hard and saved up for their end of life care. The vast majority of pet-owners can’t afford indefinite high level care.

Every day you own a pet, you are making decisions on their behalf. Yes they can’t choose euthanasia themselves, and you have to make that decision as their guardian. Ask yourself, what would this creature choose to do if they could reason and if they were aware of the relevant considerations.

Obviously that’s not an easy decision. I haven’t had a pet for the last 15 years because I don’t want to have to make this kind of decision.

I just wanna throw my own anecdote in here too; I was also really uncomfortable and uncertain making the decision but my dog got to the point where he was 17, blind, partially deaf, had nose polyps, and wasnt keeping food down or able to control his bladder for the last few days. I knew he was suffering and I didnt want his last days to be spent laying limp on a blanket in the living room hungry and in pain and he had started getting cognitive decline too and was starting to act scared because of it combined with his blindness.

The vet came over, i ordered mcdonalds chicken nuggets specifically just for my dog even if he wasnt able to eat them all, he got wrapped up in his favourite fuzzy blanket and the vet gave him a hero dose of the best doggy morphine im assuming money can buy

OP I knew I made the right choice when I saw aaaaall the pain leave his body when the painkillers hit. I was so used to him looking like the cryptkeeper I had forgotten what it looked like to see my dog without any pain in his joints or anxiety from his blindness. He transformed back into the happy little dog I knew right in front of my eyes and then he gently died being held by the people he loves with a belly full of nugs instead of wasting away for god knows how much longer.

It can feel wrong to make that decision for someone else but when I saw how much pain he had truly been carrying this whole time for the last parts of his life I realized it really was mercy and if I were in the same situation I would want that for me.

Unfortunately sometimes waiting CAN take too long. My dog was suffering and I wish I had seen it sooner but I waited and waited because he still had “good” days even if those good days were fewer and farther between. It hurts to think that he may have suffered when he didnt have to which is a harder thing to live with imho than choosing to guide him out gently.

I’m not sure on the answer myself, but you did get one thing wrong.

Even the oldest, sickest pet will still make an effort to keep themselves alive however they can: eating, drinking water, moving out of the way of danger, etc.

No, they won’t.

Plenty of illnesses cause apathy, dehydration, or loss of appetite.

Causes vary from pain so intense moving is unbearable, or nausea so severe food is inedible. It can be mental, physical, easily treated, or incurable and eventually lethal.

Either way, pets can and absolutely do choose inaction when miserable enough.

All animals want to keep living, that’s literally why animals evolved brains in the first place, to keep their bodies alive for as long as possible.

Absolutely not. Brains evolved because it gave an evolutionary advantage. They developed from just sensing light, giving an adavtange to finding food, into more complex forms, but every stage is just because it allowed them to survive long enough to reproduce usually, and, for most animals, not much longer. Most animals don’t have an advantage to keeping elderly populations alive. At best, they’re a drain on resources and can’t contribute with fighting, hunting, foraging, or whatever else. Humans are special in that we can pass down information, and elderly people have amassed a lifetime of information. Animals in nature don’t really survive that long, so there is not an evolutionary pressure for what you’re claiming. Their bodies failing is literally evidence to the contrary.

As far as I know, no animal (at least the animals we keep as pets) have an instinct to just give up and stop going through the motions of life past a certain age. Doesn’t that imply they always want to live?

This isn’t totally true. Some things will cause them to stop going through the motions that keep them alive. Regardless, performing the actions that are baked into us evolutionarily does not equal a conscious choice. We (animals) will almost always eat, drink, sleep, etc. even if we want to die. If not, suicidal people would just decide to stop, instead of having to do more extreme things. Evolution has baked behaviors into us that are hard to overcome, even if we’re conscious of it.

I consider the decision to no longer live past a certain age and certain number of health problems to be a uniquely human thing…

I find this weird. It may be (unprovable either way), but you’re ascribing so many human traits to these animals, but then refusing to entertain the idea that they may want to die in order to stop being in pain. Why? I feel like you’re showing some biases here, and if you really want to understand your opinion you need to figure out what that is.

But if they don’t die right after taking them off life support, you can’t just straight up kill them, they need to die by themselves. Why isn’t this philosophy applied to pets, who can never consent to euthanasia?

The difference is the pet will never be able to consent. I assume the rule of taking them off life support exists to require it to take time. This way they have a small window where they could come to. I don’t know though. It could also be a morality thing of not wanting to actively take a person’s “life” (if you can call it that). I suspect this could change in the future, with increasing acceptance of assisted suicide, for example. Making them die from (presumably) dehydration seems much more cruel to me if they can feel anything.

I don’t have a strong opinion either way. Do what you think is right for your pet. In my opinion though, suffering is something that should be minimized. That’s true for raising animals for food, for humans, for pets, etc. It depends on the pet, but if they are in constant pain and can’t really live life on their own (which would cause them to die in nature) then I’d consider euthanasia. I would at least not consider doing any expensive or invasive healthcare to keep them alive.

I don’t agree with putting down a dog pet unless they’re suffering. If a dog pet is in pain and there is no hope that they’ll recover, death can be mercy. It’s never not terrible. But your feelings aren’t the priority in that situation.

Just don’t ever do it at the vet - find someone who can come to you so there’s no extra stress

fuck this is depressing

edit: dog -> pet

Even the oldest, sickest pet will still make an effort to keep themselves alive however they can: eating, drinking water, moving out of the way of danger, etc.

That’s wrong. Especially old cats are very prone to just not eat when they’re old and sick.