Sometimes behavioral euthanasia is your only option.

Maybe someone else could help your dog. Maybe the right trainer could turn everything around. Maybe you haven't found the med that works for your dog yet. Maybe a different or more experienced owner wouldn't have made the same choices. Maybe if there weren't kids involved. Maybe if you weren't married. Maybe if you were married. Maybe if you live out in the country. Maybe if you were more diligent. Maybe if you didn't hover so much. Maybe. Maybe. Maybemaybemaybemaybe.

Maybe.

But none of that happened. And you're here now. And it was the right choice.

It was you. In the home you have. With whoever you had to help you. Or without any support. Handling your dog to the best of your ability at that moment in time.

That includes having limited mental and emotional bandwidth. There may have been more things you were physically capable of doing, but that doesn't mean you had the emotional and mental resources to do them. You would've done them if you could have. If you knew that you should.

But i know for sure that you didn't pay a few hundred dollars so that someone would kill your friend for no reason.

You did it because you were unsafe. Or because someone else was. Or because your dog was so overwhelmed by the world that they couldn't cope.

You certainly didn't walk into a vet appointment where every choice you'd ever made regarding the dog was questioned and you were told about all the local and breed specific rescues because you didn't try.

You made that appointment and walked in and suffered through the interrogation because you loved your dog enough to know that putting them through being rehomed or institutionalized in a shelter would lower their quality of life so significantly that it wouldn't be worth living for them. Or because you knew that no one would ever be safe living with them.

You did it because you cared. Because you loved them. Because you trusted that it was the best option. Because you tried.

And it still hurt. Even if you were angry and relieved. It still hurt.

So, let me encourage you to let go of "maybe". You loved them. You tried. You cared. It was and wasn't enough all at the same time. You made the right choice.

Yes ☝️ and also let's not forget the people who do choose to do proceed with behavioral euthanasia because it's majorly inconveniencing them and their loved ones. The management might be being successful, but they haven't been to family christmas in three years because they're too afraid to leave the animal with anyone. No family reunions. No friends coming over for dinner. No hosting playdates for the kids. No vacations. No contractors coming over to the house without serious thought about where the animal goes.

It's working.

Everyone is safe.

But it's inconvenient.

That is a perfectly valid reason to choose behavioral euthanasia as a reasonable next/last step. We are social creatures. We quite literally need regular contact with our own species to stay healthy and happy. Having a serious management animal is lowering their welfare by keeping their world small.

We need to stop vilifying death.

The dog gets sedated, surrounded by people it trusts, and then is given a large amount of opioids which causes a fatal overdose. That's it. They're gone. They didn't suffer. They didn't ever have to endure a hard time. They didn't have to think about the safety and health of everyone they may or may not come in contact with for years or months. They didn't have to plan their whole life around it.

If the vet's office is stressful, it's brief.

They got to live a very full life and then there was nothing.

The only ones who have suffered here are the people who were cutting out pieces of their lives to keep their family member alive. A family member who never even considered death as a thing in their future because they don't have the same concept of it that we do.

So, yes. People who want to euthanize an animal just because they're tired of paying for it when they have comfortably the funds, or because they don't like the maintenance of its coat, or just no longer find it cute are not included here. People who have lost a part of their lives because of their animal's management for safety reasons and euthanize because the management of that animal is inconvenient are, however, fully included in this post. These two situations are not the same even though they get lumped together under the umbrella of "convenience euthanasia". No one should be punished because they've realized that their quality of life has decreased a noticeable amount because of their beloved, but dangerous (or hopelessly overwhelmed) creature.

(Details of a personal story and an animal harming humans beneath the cut, this was an awful situation and I felt so bad for this family:)

Grooming involves someone deliberately trying to gain a minor's trust and open them up for sexual abuse. The intent is important here, because a lot of the actions that can constitute grooming are superficially completely benign.

For example, being kind, listening to a child when they talk about their problems or giving them gifts can be grooming if the person doing it intends to abuse the child, but otherwise it is just being a decent person.

That's developmentally normal - there are always edgy teenagers - and it's something kids have been doing for as long as kids have had widespread access to recorded media.

I know a lot of abuse survivors - people who experienced serious harm and lasting trauma from things other human beings did to them. It's not the same as just being weirded out because you played a game or read a book or watched a movie that was a little too graphic for you.

Helen Whitaker, England

" Sycamore Seed "