Lately, I have been thinking about euthanasia. I know it’s a tired subject, I’ve even written about it in a high school persuasive essay, but you’re sort of forced to think about it when faced with it. For example, putting an animal to “sleep”. Since the brains of animals and those of humans don’t function in the same way and, hence, their perceptions of the world are different, when a dog is told it is going to be given general anesthesia for surgery versus general anesthesia for death, it doesn’t know the difference. It will be stressed in either case, because something unfamiliar is being done to it by an unfamiliar person. Since that is the case, deciding whether or not to put an animal to sleep should not be based on whether or not it will wake up. It should be based on how much you need the animal and whether the animal will be able to lead a productive life after it awakens.
Now, about a year ago there was a woman on Craigslist’s pet section, of which I am a frequent visitor since adopting my dog, claiming that her 15 year old dog was suffering from an eye condition, rheumatism, and multiple tumors all over its body, and needed surgery. She was begging the good people on Craigslist to donate money for this cause. I wanted to smack her, but I realized how much she was hurting. Yet this kind of selfishness, keeping a poor suffering (15-YEAR-OLD, no less) animal alive because it is too painful to let it go, is downright offensive to me. The dog doesn’t know it will wake up after all its tumors are removed. It is tired, in pain, and while it may love and be loyal to its owner, it might also want to DIE.
Animals know when it’s time to go, but in today’s society, unfortunately, we get to decide for them. We decide what kind of life AND what kind of death they’re going to have. So even if that dog is ready to die, the woman won’t let it. My firm belief is, if the animal has no chance of a happy care-free life, as all pets’ lives should be, fight the desperate need to keep it alive and let it go. Giving it an injection actually lessens the suffering. Rather than choking to death, it will peacefully fall asleep as you hold it in your arms. You owe your pet that much.
Ironically, today on the Law & Order SVU rerun this topic was explored. Except, of course, it had to do with humans. A mother gave her 1 month old daughter a lethal dose of anti-depressants to stop her suffering from a rare disease called Tay-Sachs. The disease, apparently, is so bad that the child would have no time to even develop normally. Her brain would not function properly and she would die a painful and uncomfortable death before her 5th birthday. I recognize the law and the fact that once the child is born it becomes illegal to kill it, because it is its own separate entity and even a parent has no right to take its life. It makes total sense. But what about when you love your child so much you want to prevent it from suffering, especially when the disease is so clearly diagnosed and its symptoms so grimly forecasted? By no means is it an easy decision to make, but I could not condemn a mother who did this, especially since I believe life is suffering in the first place, so why cause more suffering than is already prescribed by nature?
taniadudina
mayamalia
katd234
“…deciding whether or not to put an animal to sleep should not be based on whether or not it will wake up. It should be based on how much you need the animal and whether the animal will be able to lead a productive life after it awakens.”
This makes sense to me, although I feel that I need to give it more thought. Here are my concerns:
You say that a pet is meant to be care-free, but animals in general are not meant to be care-free. We have all evolved to deal with the good and the bad and through it all maintain a will to survive. Why should pets be different? To me the difference lies in the fact that pets are these sort of weird “animal children.” They are dependent animals. We can’t let them out into the wild or let nature take its course. It’s a bizarre, “unnatural” situation so no natural rules apply.
You also mention that a dog may be ready to die but we just don’t let it. I’ve heard that when animals are “ready to die” they find a place to hide and stay there. But this is hard to phrase. Does an animal stop eating and look for a comfortable quiet spot when it decides that it’s time? Or does it just lose its appetite and feel the need to hide when death is close? Animals in the wild (and feral animals) live for a long time in suffering. Sometimes they get better, sometimes they die. There is no euthanasia in nature–there’s just survival or no survival.
But again this is as difficult as it is because pets are a different class of animals–they are animals for whom people (and not the forces of nature) are responsible.
In terms of the SVU episode–this is interesting because I think about it really often (no, not SVU, but the subject matter). I don’t think I’ll ever have a baby until I decide first what I would do if it is born with some kind of terrible disease or mental disability. Again, human society and nature don’t see eye to eye here. In nature, a sick baby just doesn’t survive, no questions asked. In society, the sick are “artificially” protected.
I once read about a case in which a child was born with no frontal lobe. It’s cranium was virtually empty, with only the part of the brain responsible for reflexes remaining. The hospital and the parents had to care for it, even though–it’s terrifying to say this–without these brain regions the child was not what we would call human. It would probably die within months and the fluids in its head had to be drained constantly, causing it tremendous pain. When I read about this, I pictured myself in the parents’ shoes, feeling crushed and trapped. It would be illegal for the parents not to spend every penny they had to keep this child alive as long as it could stay alive. This to me is twisted, but you’re right, what’s the way out of it?
With pets it’s simple enough (though not at all simple), with humans, I’m at a total loss. Sorry to end on a blah note =/