Response to Courtney

In her blog Courtney posted the question: To sum it all up, here is my question. If an animal is suffering (no matter if they are a pet or not), is euthanizing them in their best interests, even when they are young, or is it cutting a life short?

When I was very young my grandparents had a dog named Pepper. She was 18 years old when I was born and had been battling cancerous tumors for three years. My grandparents loved her as a part of the family and spent a good chunk of their income having the tumors removed when they popped up over the years. Eventually though, the cancer began progressing too fast. The tumors invaded the lungs and Pepper was clearly having a hard time breathing. She was suffering severely. Finally my grandparents decided that they would have her euthanized. My grandmother has often told me it was the hardest decision that she ever had to make.

My grandfather couldn't be in the room when they put her down because it was just too much for him to handle. My grandmother stayed, however, and the Vet told her that Pepper would be given a shot and simply fall asleep in her lungs. There would be no more suffering. Once in a while putting an animal to sleep isn't so simple. When they gave Pepper the shot they missed the vein and my grandmother told me she howled miserably for the next few minutes until they could re-administer the shot, this time correctly.

Would it have been better to not have put Pepper down and avoided those moments of suffering? My answer is no. If she had lived the month that it would have taken her to die slowly she would have experienced a far worse ordeal. If my grandmother's pain at hearing her dog die in pain were removed from the equation then I think the choice is clear.

I am very much against killing animals simply for consumption but I think that when an animal is in great pain and will continue to be so then it's best to put them out of their misery. It's more humane. Kaldewaij does not address this in her discussion of harm of death but I think that based on the criteria that she presents in her essay she would not be opposed to euthanization as long as the animal was truly suffering in life and there was no chance for that suffering to be alleviated any other way. That animal would have no opportunities to look forward to if their life had not been cut short, only more pain, so the harm of death is actually lessened by euthanization.

My question for this blog is: How much money should people be expected to spend on their sick animals? Do they deserve the same medical consideration as children or other members of the family?