Wet Cleanup on Aisle 5

Eulogy

Mr. Bones was a wire-haired Vizsla, with a tuft of golden hair atop his head, expressive green eyes, and a whiskery beard that gave him the look of a wise old man.  He was a bit timid, but it didn’t take him long to warm up to you and when he did, he would dole out tentative little dog kisses with his warm, wet tongue.

He spent his last two days on death row.

Mr. Bones’ only crime was having had one too many staph infections.  When his owner also came down with a life-threatening staph infection, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to jump to the conclusion that Mr. Bones might be the carrier of an horrific strain of bacteria.

It might have taken a rocket scientist, however, to convince Mr. Bones’ owner that Bones wasn’t necessarily the source of the harmful bug, seeing as how staphylococci lurk pretty much everywhere.  Rather than jumping to hasty conclusions, it might be a good idea to determine whether the strain of staph that Mr. Bones carried matched the strain of staph that almost cost the owner her arms, and her life.

Apparently the owner’s doctors didn’t see it that way.  They managed to convince her that Bones was a dangerously lethal germ-carrying machine, despite our attempts to prove otherwise.  So Mr. Bones was left with us, and our task was to euthanize an otherwise healthy 4 year-old dog.

His last two days with us were happy ones, filled with unexpected treats, rousing games of fetch, and lots of forbidden foods, including part of a chocolate cupcake.

As we took him to meet his end, he stopped when he saw our resident clinic cat.  Mr. Bones flopped onto his belly so as not to be intimidating, stretched his paws out in front, and wagged his body, wanting to play.  He was a good dog, and a few more treats found their way into his mouth before we let him go.

While I mourn the loss, and question the morality of euthanizing healthy pets, I try to remind myself of three things.  One, if I were in the owner’s shoes, without a thorough understanding of staph, and relying on my physician to provide that knowledge to me, I might have come to the same conclusion as she did.

Two, try as we might to change the owner’s mind, she was absolutely unfazed.  If we had refused to euthanize Mr. Bones, she would have taken him to a vet that would.  Better that he go surrounded by people that loved him.

And three, close to 10,000 homeless pets are euthanized every day, most for no good reason other than that our society still considers every species but one expendable.  At least Mr. Bones had a good four years, and at least he died a happy dog.

His ashes are under the big tree out back.