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

It’s merciful but it’s incredibly difficult. What would you want someone to do for you?

When you come home and your 20 year old dog is lying on the floor in a puddle of pee, poo, vomit, and blood and can’t get up it’s likely time (or past time) to help him go, but you’ll still feel terrible about it

When your blind dog with liver cancer is at the date your vet thought she would pass; she still lifts her ears and wags her tail a bit when you walk in, but she also can’t hold bowel or bladder, vomits most days, and has to get carried to the yard; and you put her down a few days before you have surgery knowing you won’t be able to clean the floor or carry her for a couple of weeks, you’ll feel guilty and selfish and like you killed your dog because she was an inconvenience even though everyone tells you it was the right thing to do.

Looking at other comments I will point out one thing nobody mentioned so far: keeping an old per alive is not always cheap.
You have to calculate the cruel numbers against the gain or loss also.
You could give an other neglected - abandoned pet a new life, instead of making your loved one to slowly expire.
Or I do not wish the situation on anyone, but pet meds vs human food can come into play too.

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.

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.

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.

Euthanizing pets has always been the rule rather than the exception in my family.

We are all big animal lovers and often end up with older pets that have no home.

When the animal gets to a point where it’s crying in pain often or can no longer eat or walk or some combination of those 3, we usually take the animal to the vet and have them euthanized.

We (my family) don’t believe in making an animal suffer for our own wishes that they would stay alive. It seems selfish.

Some people will keep an animal in pain, alive for a long time.

That’s their choice. But I think ethically, it’s wrong.

Let them go peacefully surrounded by those who love them.

Also I’m pro self euthanizing for the same reasons. But that’s a different topic.

I believe in the rule of 5 assuming the elder pet isn’t in pain or something similar. Basically, if the pet can do their 5 favorite things without accommodation or discomfort, there’s no reason to put them down. If they can no longer do the 5 things without pain or accommodation, then it’s becoming time.

Animals cannot tell you how much pain they are in. Their last days can be absolutely horrific. You have the power to spare them perfectly useless suffering.

Vets strongly advise: better a week too soon than a day too late. Because that last day is unnecessary; it’s there because you couldn’t stomach the decision, not because it gave your pet anything meaningful.

You will know when it comes. When your pet is dying from some stupid cancer and you did everything already and what’s coming is nothing but pain, no hope, no relief, no nothing but suffering. You will make the right decision. And have someone come over, while you make their last meal something amazing, and they are eating a snack while they still have appetite to be happy about that and ignore the little pinch in the leg that brings the last sleep.

And you will grieve in ways you didn’t know you could, but it will still have been right because there is no sacred point scored from letting your lil pup die a few days later in agony you could have prevented but chose not to.

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 agree with legalizing assisted suicide for terminally ill humans. As such, if the pets quality of life at the end of life declines that much, then yes. Sometimes the treatments make things worse.

For example, on the human side, people may not want to spend most of their last days in hospitals hearing machines beep and sleeping in an uncomfortable hospital bed. They want to go home, be comfortable, and die not in pain. Fair. In states where it’s legal, that sometimes means taking prescribed euthanasia on their terms, rather than letting the cancer do it. Sometimes it means just having the option close by as a reassurance while letting the cancer take them, but I digress.

How much do our pets like the vet? Staying overnight? Considering that at the end, alongside pain, is something we have to weigh in these decisions. Unfortunately, unlike humans, our pets can’t make that decision for themselves. You’ll have to decide for them. When is enough enough? What’s the balance between their pain and your want to have them with you? None of us can tell you that answer.

The only real advice I can give you is to listen to them, really listen to them, and don’t allow your personal pain drown out their voice. Humans or animals.

My nearly 13 year old beagle was put down last week. I didn’t want to put him down and I cried for a long time both before and after. He had Cushing’s disease and he got to the point where he could no longer walk or stand. He stopped being interested in food and he stopped responding to his name and things happening around him.

If we didn’t put him down I don’t think he would have lived much longer and he probably would have died in pain. When dogs are euthanized they give them a sedative and he looked extremely peaceful before he passed away.

The way I see it is that everything has an end. It’s just a part of existence that you have to accept. While I am extremely sad that he passed away, I am also extremely happy that he existed and that he was my dog.

Let me share my personal story. Trigger warning for anybody reading this, there’s a lot of details.

My spouse and I had a beloved cat who was amazing. Rescued her as a kitten, the runt of her litter. She was born sickly and got worse for a while, we thought she wouldn’t make it for several weeks.

But we nursed her back to health and she started to thrive. She never got big, even fully grown, she was 6.5 lbs. Most people thought she was still a kitten, but she had 60 lbs of attitude lol.

She was a wonderful cat, full of life, playful, fierce, super smart, my spouse and I were totally in love with her.

Then one day, she stopped eating and started acting really lethargic. We went through all the typical potential causes. Tooth pain, upset stomach, constipation, UTI, etc.

Took her to the vet several times. After almost 2 weeks of us barely able to get her to eat more than a few bites of her usual favorite treats per day, we had them scan her for potential blockages or other stomach issues.

Vet came back with the results, it was cancer, her entire abdomen was filled with large tumors. 100% terminal, the vet said that there was no way to remove it all without killing her from the internal trauma because the cancer had spread so far and was completely surrounding many of her organs.

We were absolutely devastated. She was only about 3 and a half years old. The vet said it was just bad luck, it was rare to see this kind of cancer in a young otherwise healthy cat, but it did sometimes happen.

Even still, we asked about chemotherapy, (yes they do that for pets sometimes). The vet said that at best, it would only give us 1-3 more months if we were lucky, and she would be drugged up so much that she would basically be in a state of dillusion the whole time. Plus it would have cost between $4,000- and $8,000. Which was far beyond anything we could afford.

My spouse and I went home, cried our eyes out for the next 2 days, and talked about end of life care. Our primary vet had given us a pamphlet about in-home euthanasia. They come to your home, you can lay down and cuddle with your pet, play music or talk to them. The vet administers a shot, and after about 10-15 minutes, they fall asleep and then…they’re gone.

We chose that option and it was as positive of an experience as it can be, when doing something so sad.

We laid down on both sides of her, placed her on her favorite blanket, and just gently pet her, kissed her, and quietly told her what a brave girl she was and how much we loved her. Our vet was super calm and respectful. After she administered the shot, she let us be with her, and checked her pulse every 5 minutes or so. After the third time, she quietly told us, “Alright, she’s passed. Take all the time you need. When you’re ready, I’ll take her back with me.”

The vet handled the cremation and a week or two later my spouse and I got our cat’s ashes delivered to us in a little urn, with a clipping of her hair and a little paw print in clay. There was a hand-written note from the vet with her condolences, signed by a bunch of the vet techs, it was very sweet.

It’s a brutally hard choice to make, but I think it’s the right one. Our cat was in so much pain, she was malnourished, exhausted, dehydrated, she had lost all the joy that a healthy life provided her. Looking into her eyes and seeing her in so much pain, that’s what convinced me and my spouse to do it. I think it would have been selfish for us to keep her alive in that state waiting for her to die “naturally” or forcing a massive cocktail of drugs into her just so we could get a few more days or weeks with her.

I don’t condemn people for putting it off, I get it, it was one of the hardest decicions I’ve had to make as an adult. I wept like a baby before and after it for many days. If you haven’t seen it before, I can’t describe it. But there is a certain “look” an animal gets when it’s near the end. They know, they are smart, they have a soul of some kind I think, they can sense it. As somebody who is an animal lover and has had pets all my life, you learn what it looks like. It’s a look of pain and pleading, a look that says, “I’m in pain, and I’m tired, it’s time for me to go.”

Some people say that pets can’t tell you if they want to be done, but I think they can, it’s that look in their eyes of desperation, and when you’re my age and you’ve had to say goodbye to numerous pets over the years, you learn what it looks like.

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’m an old guy, and have had lots of pet over my life. so I’ve thought about this a lot.

Years ago I came to the position that the most compassionate thing to do for my pets was to try and assess if their days are more full of joy, or more full of pain and suffering. We can’t ask our pets that, we can only do our best to figure it out. If they’re spending more time suffering than enjoying their lives, then I think it’s a kindness to put them down.

We don’t usually have to make that decision for other humans, because they can decide for themselves. Note that we do make the decision sometimes to “pull the plug” on people rather than keep the alive.

Also note that animals do sometimes go off to die when they’re sick and miserable. In fact, when dogs and cats have illnesses that are miserable but treatable, we sometimes have to be careful that they don’t go off to die before treatment is done.