Time to Let Go

My guess is that over the years we’ve had 300 dogs in our house as pets. I know it’s hard to believe, but we have loved each and every one of them in the same way that most people love their one or two pets. We’ve known their personalities, we’ve known where each likes to be scratched—we’ve known each one in a way that most people simply don’t think is possible.

As I’m writing this we have 25, which is to say that probably 275 of them have died in our care. Perhaps 10 have passed away at home, usually in their sleep, and we’ve generally found them in the morning. It’s shocking and terrible, but if they’ve died at home, it usually means that they hadn’t shown signs of illness prior to their death. Death came suddenly, and hopefully painlessly.

The remaining 265 have died at a veterinarian’s office, which means that we have decided on the appropriate time for their lives to end. It is an awful decision to have to make.

When we first started in rescue, Debbie saw a golden retriever at the West Los Angeles shelter. They estimated his age as fourteen, and he had a leg injury that made it difficult for him to walk. He had been turned in by someone as a stray that they claimed to have found, a ludicrous deception since it was clear that this dog had not jumped over a fence or run away. He could barely go from here to there without falling over.

The shelter people knew that they could never place him, so they were going to euthanize him. Under the circumstances, it was the obvious move for them to make, and I don’t blame them at all. But Debbie asked if she could take him to our vet and get a health assessment. If our vet said that he could be made healthy with a reasonable quality of life, then we would have him do so, and we would adopt the dog, which Debbie had already named Buddy.

If our vet said that there was no way to give Buddy that quality of life, then he would put Buddy down, with Debbie there to pet and comfort him during the process.

The shelter, of course, was fine with that, and Debbie took Buddy to our vet. I don’t remember all the details, but our vet said that with medication, pain and otherwise, Buddy could certainly be healthy enough to enjoy the time he had left. The vet estimated that time to be about six months.

So we took Buddy home, and he blossomed. He enjoyed interacting with the other dogs, though he certainly didn’t partake in the wrestling matches that spontaneously broke out. But he watched them from a distance and smiled a lot and ate really well. There was not a single day that we had any regret about the decision to rescue him.

The vet was off on his timing by a month, unfortunately in the wrong direction. After five months, it was like Buddy fell off a cliff. He stopped eating, didn’t want to get up, and disengaged from the other dogs.

So we took him back to the vet, who confirmed that Buddy had reached the end.

As I described with Tara, the normal euthanasia process is for the vet to use a mild sedative to calm the dog down. Then he shaves an area on the leg to make it easier to get to a vein, and he administers a vial of pink liquid through a syringe. This is what he did with Buddy, and Debbie and I comforted Buddy and petted him throughout the process.

Debbie and I try to always both be there when we have to put a dog down, but sometimes it isn’t possible, and only one of us is able to pet and provide comfort. When we are both there, she usually pets the dog on the head and whispers in his or her ear. I do the petting on the dog’s back and side, and we both keep it up until the vet checks for a heartbeat and tells us that it’s over.

Since it was early in our rescue lives, we were very, very upset by what had taken place with Buddy. Not Tara upset, but certainly emotionally drained.

But that night we came to terms with it and developed a point of view that we’ve tried to find comfort in ever since. What we needed to focus on was that for whatever time we had Buddy or any other dog, he or she was safe and happy and loved.

That was all we could do, and it would have to be good enough, or we’d go insane. I say this knowing full well that most people would look at our life with dogs and decide that we’ve already opted for the “go insane” route.

People write to me all the time for advice about when to euthanize. They confuse my being a dog lunatic with my being a dog expert. Sometimes they’re facing the dreaded decision and are worried that they might make the wrong one. Just as often they’ve already made the decision and gone ahead with the euthanasia, and belatedly fear that they’ve done something wrong.

I’m very reluctant to offer any kind of counsel. First of all, I don’t know their dog and haven’t seen the situation firsthand. I know only what they’re telling me, and that could easily be colored by the emotional state that they’re obviously in.

I’m also not a vet, although sometimes I feel like one, since among other things I probably give out sixty pills a day for various ailments. But I don’t want to recommend to people that they put their dog down when in fact it might have an ailment that a vet could easily cure. Nor do I want to recommend that they keep it alive, since perhaps that would be prolonging incurable suffering.

The overriding point is that I’m not in their home, and I certainly can’t attempt to evaluate the situation from a distance. I wouldn’t even feel comfortable doing it from up close; it is a personal decision that they have to arrive at themselves, with the counsel of their vet.

So all I can do is give them the benefit of my experience, and tell them how we’ve evolved on the subject.

In the case of Tara, I feel we waited too long. We took extraordinary measures to prolong her life, but in retrospect I think that was more for us than for her, though that is certainly not how we viewed it at the time.

I think we should have let her go sooner, but hopefully we have learned from our mistake.

The most important clue, in my eyes, is whether the dog is eating. Now, I don’t mean to say that if it’s not eating that means its life should be ended; I mean it in reverse. If a dog is in bad pain or feeling miserable, it will not eat. So I don’t think we have ever made a decision to euthanize a dog that was eating well.

The other rule we go by is less well defined. It involves dignity, and our absolute refusal to let a dog lose it. If a dog can’t get up on its own, if it is urinating on itself, those are the kinds of things that involve a loss of dignity in our eyes, and we just don’t think that’s fair to the dog.

But it’s almost always a tough call, and the bottom line is quality of life. I got a call once from a woman in Palm Springs who had heard about us through another rescue group. She had a golden named Winnie, only one and a half years old, who had a tumor on her leg. The woman had neither the money nor the inclination to deal with it, and she asked us if we would take Winnie.

I drove out and picked up just about the sweetest, most beautiful dog I had ever seen. She was blond and thin and had a perpetual smile on her face. She also had a tumor on her leg the size of a softball.

I took her right to our vet, who told me that the tumor was obviously cancerous, and so large that it could not be removed. The only solution was amputation of the leg, and even that would not do the trick. A bone cancer that advanced would have already started to spread, and it was going to kill Winnie, one way or the other.

The question we most often ask our vets is what they would do in a situation if it was their dog that was ill or injured. In Winnie’s case, he surprised me by saying he would amputate the leg.

I pushed back, especially since he said the amputation would probably give her only six to eight months of continued comfortable life. Wouldn’t most of that time be spent adjusting to having only three legs? I asked. Why put her through that difficulty for such a short time?

He made his case, and at the end of the day, we trusted him. We had Winnie’s leg amputated, and the result was amazing. Within forty-eight hours, she was up and around, running on the three legs better than most dogs do on four. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Her energy level was sky-high; after all, she was little more than a puppy. She wrestled with the other dogs, fetched tennis balls, and loved every second that she had.

Those seconds added up to about ten months. When she got sick it happened all at once, and she really did not suffer at all. Giving her that extra time was as good a decision as we’ve ever made; Winnie made the most of it.

The best advice I can give is to try your best to think only of the dog and its quality of life. In most cases, if a loving dog owner is struggling with the decision, then it’s probably time to let the dog go, because those are the kinds of owners that look for reasons to delay and deny. It’s human nature.

Sometimes you get it right and sometimes you get it wrong. All you can do is your best.