Glen writes: < So, one of our cats died on Wednesday. She went in for exploratory surgery to investigate a mass that was preventing food from moving from her stomach to her intestines. It was a pyloric adenoma the surgeon saw no good way to fix. So we killed her. The important question is: To what extent did we destroy any happiness, good will, comfort, etc. by putting her through a 2 week process of changing her diet, forcing barium down her throat, poking her for blood draws, etc? She was a super happy cat for ~5 years. But her life ended in terror and pain (despite the relatively humane way we did things compared to what it could have been). >
I have a different view of going to extreme means to help a pet than I once did. It is easy to look back in hindsight with diagnostic knowledge that was hard to come by and say it could/should have gone another way. It's harder for a young animal that might get back to normal and be happy again. I had a 13 year old dog once that did recover for about six months but then sure enough the cancer came back even worse, along with other degenerative processes that made her life hard. I should have thought more about the average lifetime for that breed and the severity of her condition and let her go earlier, but the diagnosis had come as a surprise. I don't know about cats, but dogs I think recognize what is happening. This discussion of humans is also interesting. https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/01/how-do-people-communicate-before-death/580303/ ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
