I am once again dumping my raw thoughts on Lemmy and asking your opinion on them.
My first dog (and pet in general) is nowhere near the age of me needing to think about putting her down, but having a dog has introduced me to the world of opinions on whether they should be put down when they get too old.
I’ve read a lot of very strong pro-euthanasia pet owner opinions, even going as far as accusing people refusing to put down their pets as “cruel” or actively wanting their pets to suffer. It really seems like a majority of pet owners, at least in the English speaking world, think putting their pets down is something you should always do when their bodies deteriorate past a certain point, and every time this is brought up you get a lot of emotional comments shaming anyone who doesn’t subscribe to that philosophy.
The core argument being made seems to be that when their health conditions pile up past a point, it’s not “worth” letting the pet live anymore, supposedly for their sake. But when I think about it further, I ask how can you be sure? 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. How can you, who is not the pet, say for sure they would prefer to die than keep living? You can’t ask them, and you can’t get in their mind to determine how much they still appreciate being alive. 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. 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?
I consider the decision to no longer live past a certain age and certain number of health problems to be a uniquely human thing, and it doesn’t feel right to impose that on a pet who probably doesn’t have those thoughts. Even with humans, we refrain from making that decision for them. Someone who’s in a coma isn’t eligible for euthanasia just because they haven’t expressed a desire to live, and the most their family can legally do is to stop actively keeping them alive with technology and let them die naturally. 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? You don’t have to keep subjecting your pet to more and more invasive treatments just to extend their lives by a small amount, but at the same time, what gives you the moral right to unilaterally decide when they’re done with living? Why is letting your pet die naturally in the comfort of their own home seen as cruel, while choosing for them when they should die is considered humane?
What do you think? I genuinely don’t know how I feel about this but want to understand the problem and where I stand on it before my dog gets old enough for these things to apply.
Please don’t take any of this as being directed at you personally, I think your opinion is 100% valid, but you’re the only one I saw with this stance.
I think this is something very important to consider when it comes to things like living wills and just how we as a society feel that a medical system should operate, preserving life at all costs vs preserving quality of life.
I won’t go deep into details, but I have been there to witness the passing of both my wife’s parents in the last 2 years. Both were normal for their age and overall health conditions up to the very days they died. Both died suddenly, though not immediately, and one was upset they called the ambulance because they said they were fine, both those ended up being last words.
Both became unrecoverable very soon after being admitted to the hospital, as in less than 12 hours. The family made the decision to take them off the life support stuff, as there was nothing treatable. A fair decision. But what I witnessed afterwards was the cruelest stuff I have ever seen. It isn’t like on tv where they turn the stuff off and in a couple seconds it’s over. The sights and sounds of suffering were horrific, and all of us who were there just had to sit for hours, watching our loved ones in total unconscious agony while we were all just wishing for it to be over.
After I saw firsthand what natural death can look like, I thought it was a sin that with all the equipment and medicine in that hospital, that no one was allowed to end the suffering, either for the dying, or for the living. It looked and sounded like physical torture, it was undignified, and I sat there the whole time saying we would not leave an animal to suffer like this, so why are we letting it happen to our family?
It really solidified my thoughts on assisted suicide and the concept of keeping someone “alive” at all cost.
I get if you want to be in your own home instead of hospice someday, or that you shouldn’t have all your freedoms as long as you’re not a danger, but we don’t all get the luxury to die in a brief moment in our sleep. For a lot of us, it will be a long processes, and it won’t always be us conscious or able to make determinations on that process.
Again, just sharing my personal experience, nothing to argue against you in particular. I just find myself able to consider and discuss death more than most people around me seem comfortable doing.