I got a sad email from my mother last week. My brother’s dog, Beau, had to be put to sleep after they found out unexpectantly that he had inoperable cancer. Beau was only four years old.
As you can imagine, my nieces and nephew, who are all under the age of eight, took it rather hard. So did their parents actually. They had gotten Beau when he was just a little puppy. They took him to training classes and they treated him like another member of the family. He had grown to be a big dog as Boxers typically are, but he was sweet and loving and great around the kids.
And as is typical when something happens to a loved one’s pet, it got me thinking about our own pets – Sophie,
and Oscar.
Sophie’s pushing 11, but she’s still a wiry little thing and hasn’t changed much from when she was a kitten. It’s hard to think of her growing old and tired, but I know it will happen some day before too long. And Oscar, well, he’s still just a pup. He’s 18 months old and has more energy than either he (or we) know what to do with. It’s hard to imagine something happening to either of them and we certainly don’t like to think about it, but I guess that the possibility is always there.
I tend to worry when I see things that are out of the ordinary. Like the rash that Oscar recently developed after coming back from the groomer. The one that we had to treat with a special medicine until it went away. Or his little right leg which is bow-legged and seems longer than the other one. (The vet said it shouldn’t cause him any problems unless he starts limping.) And yes, I tend to worry more than most, but still… he’s part of our family and the thought of something happening to him breaks my heart.
Which leads me to the point of this post (yes there is one, I promise). What do you do if something happens to your pet? I know there are plenty of people who say, “It’s just a pet, what’s the big deal?” And I know other people, like my sweet aunt, who do everything in their power to help their pet during a time of need. I remember when her little cat, the one she had for years, was diagnosed with cancer. The doctors tried to save her by operating, but in the end, were not able to do so.
The CPA and I have talked about what we would do if something similar happened to Oscar or Sophie. When the vet said that Oscar’s leg could only be fixed by having surgery and resetting the bones, my husband and I agreed that we wouldn’t do that. But… would we think differently if it were two years down the road and our beloved little guy was in pain?
And I don’t think it’s necessarily a question of how far we would go, but of how much money we would spend. Taking pets to the vet isn’t cheap. Some procedures costs thousands of dollars to perform and unless you have the money lying around, it may put you in a difficult position of having to decide your pet’s fate, especially in today’s uncertain economy.
I believe that no one truly knows what they would do until faced with such a situation. And it’s a situation that we don’t like to think about, but the reality of my brother losing Beau at such a young doggy age made me realize that we never know when something might happen.
So now I ask you: what would you do (or what have you done) in a similar situation? And how big a factor would money be in your decision?
He’s a VERY active high strung dog, and after shelling out $300 for xrays we found out that he has a knee injury. We were told that he’d need to go on a diet to loose weight (yup, we’re the bad dog parents with fat dogs) and that he could no longer play fetch because it was too strenuous. For a ball obsessed dog like him that’s pretty much torture. 
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