I am fond of pugs. I've had three. The first I had to put to sleep, the second went to live some other people because he was an outdoor dog and preferred dogs to people, and the third got old and sick and I had to put him to sleep Monday.
He went downhill in five days. He quit eating on Saturday, and by Monday I realized his time was up. I made an appointment for Wednesday.
By Monday he was in horrible shape - and it only took an hour. His breathing was very labored. Among humans it would be Cheyne-Stokes breathing. When I checked his eyes the surface was peeling off.
That was it. I found a place four blocks away that said bring him in.
I walked in with my girlfriend, with him in my arms, and the assistant took him immediately to the vet. She came out five minutes later and said he immediately "went to sleep."
They put him in the box I had bought, we left, and I buried him in the backyard.
He was about 13 years old. I'm not exactly sure because he was a rescue pug, and was supposedly seven when I got him.
If you are not willing to deal with an old, sick dog and put him out of his misery, then you should not have a dog. Because doing this to such a dog, as painful as it is, is a mercy to them.
Rudyard Kipling understood these things, with his poem, "The Power of the Dog."
6 comments:
Sorry to hear about that Bob. Dogs can certainly break your heart.
+JMJ+
I'm so sorry about Pug, Bob. =(
He's better now than what he was.
Well, I've had a bunch of German Shepherds in my time and one Husky, and she was absolutely the dumbest damn dog I've ever owned. The only thing she was good at was running off, characteristic of the breed. She was as nice as you could ask for but I've met smarter rocks.
Freedom for a moron comes at a price and she eventually got hit by a vehicle on one of the country roads around here and was missing for a day and a half before my wife and I found her. She was still alive but structurally mangled beyond repair and in tremendous pain. Hard as it was to do, I shot her right between the eyes, cried for a moment, and then buried her.
I guess doing it yourself makes you a "manly man."
My parents have a little shelty that, in this case, is the dog's equivalent of the ditzy blonde. About an hour ago she was chasing a shadow on the floor barking, biting and pawing at it. She does this quite a bit(which is cheap humor) but the persistent barking would drive me nuts if I lived in the same house.
Herbie
I'm without a pistol right now but if I wasn't I just would have shot him and put him out of his misery faster than I was able to.
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