I mentioned a couple of posts ago how our cat Susu had fought back from a serious illness. A few days ago, she took a turn for the worse and stopped eating again. Susu didn’t have the strength to fight back this time. We took her to the vet just a few hours ago, and released her from her pain. Irene and I were there with her at the last breath.
Our dog Sadie has been suffering increasingly from debilitating pain in her right front shoulder during the past few months. We’ve had her on several increasingly strong arthritis medications with no obvious beneficial effect.
Cats are creatures that usually have egos that extend significantly beyond their usually diminutive size. But they are also generally equipped with a strong sense of self-preservation that comes from being a predator that often ends up on the wrong side of the food chain (I.E.: on someone else’s dinner plate). We have one cat in our house who possesses more than the usual helping of cattitude…Rommel is his name. (more…)
I was reading one of my news feeds the other day and came across this gem about a woman who beat a dog breeder with a dead chihuahua. Apparently, the dog breeder sold the puppy when it was too young. The purchaser took the puppy to a vet who told her it needed to be returned to its mother, but the puppy died while in transit. The puppy’s purchaser then proceeded to assault the dog breeder using the dead chihuahua as a weapon.
My wife Irene called me on the phone at about 7:00 am on Friday morning. This confused me: I was working from home and thus sleeping in until around 7:30, and Irene doesn’t normally leave for work until about 8:00 am. The morning brain-fog cleared a bit, though, when Irene explained that she was out walking our dog and calling from her cell. She had found a lost dog, and was bringing it home so we could call the SPCA, and could I please get the cats into the house?
Our cats aren’t supposed to be outside, but often a couple, usually Tux and Rommel, sneak out. This morning, however, four had made it out the door. I managed to get three back in, but Bilbo was no where to be found.
Our cat Sasha died Wednesday just after 11:00 pm. It was pretty sudden- she was fine Wednesday morning, a little off around dinner time, and in shock by bedtime. We rushed her to the emergency vet, but they couldn’t save her. It looks like she was sick and respirated some vomit, and this was complicated by her heart and kidney problems.
Sasha came into our life as something of a lost soul…
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My wife and I have a lot of animal companions. Seven cats and a dog share our house, and a horse is stabled a few minutes away. Most of the critters are healthy and easy to get along with. But there are exceptions.
Earlier this year we had to have our dog, Sheena, euthanized. It was a tough decision. But I was pretty clear that Sheena was our first and last dog: I loved her, but dogs are a lot of work.
Irene has been working on me ever since. She wanted another dog. But we have a household of seven cats, and that's busy enough. Up until this weekend, logic prevailed: despite several near misses, we remained dog free. I finally broke down this weekend. Meet Sadie...
Sadie is another SPCA puppy. We figured Sheena gave us 11 years of love, so this seemed like the best choice. Irene had been a volunteer dogwalker for the past couple of weeks. I knew this was risky, but I hoped it might get the "dog bug" out of her. She brought home a few "bugs", but never actually shook her interest in having another dog.
Sadie is five years old, a Rottweiler something cross. She's fairly quiet, seems mellow, and is a lot less timid than Sheena. So far, she is acting more scared of the cats than the other way around. We'll have to see how that works...
Irene and I love our animals. Seven cats, a horse...
...and until yesterday, a dog. We made the decision On July 3rd to have Sheena euthanized. Goodbye, old girl...
It was a tough choice. Sheena was still alert and wasn't screaming out in pain. Up until year ago, Sheena was still pretty active: she was at least 13 years old, which is pretty old for a dog her size.
Last year, though, she had a setback. She had what seemed to me to be a stroke: the vet thought it might have been a tumour or nerve damage of some kind. For over a week she couldn't walk at all, and afterwards she was very weak. She recovered some of her mobility, though she stopped going on walks of more than a hundred yards or so. She never recovered her balance, really: a light bump would tip her over. And her hearing was mostly gone afterwards...cataracts took away most of her vision a few years ago.
The last few months we watched Sheena getting more and more feeble. Recently, she reached the point where she often couldn't stand up without help, and she was barely eating.
I don't know how Sheena felt about it, but I kept thinking that her quality of life had gotten pretty meager. Irene and I had talked several times about what it would take for us to decide it was "time" for Sheena. Ultimately, Irene called me up in tears and told me she felt that time had arrived.
I am an agnostic. I don't really believe in an afterlife, but then again I don't disbelieve. I'd like to think that we made the right choice, and somewhere Sheena's spirit is alive and healthy, enjoying a run through a grassy field with Irene's horse Brandy like she did years ago. Maybe one day I'll be there too, and Sheena will run over and let me scratch her ears the way she liked. I'd like that...
