Ninety percent of cat and dog owners leave the vet’s consulting room when their companion animal is being euthanised at the end of their life. Are we all cowards? I couldn’t stay in the room myself but I didn’t feel like a coward. Perhaps I am wrong. Although my girlfriend, who my cat knew very well, did stay behind.
A veterinarian in South Africa makes a good point – actually it’s a great point. He says that at the last moments of a companion animal’s life she is searching for her owner if her owner is not in the room.
“They search every face in the room for their loved person….”
In short a cat in a veterinarian’s consulting room at the last moments of her life desperately needs her human companion – the person with whom she has possibly lived all her life.
So, how do you feel about leaving the room, now that you have read the words of a “tired broken-hearted vet”.
I confess that I feel differently about it. However, I find it almost unbearably hard to be with my cat when she is being euthanized because I will be watching her dying before my eyes. Yes, it’s humane but she is being killed. I don’t want to see that. It’s too painful. Do we have to see it? Perhaps we do. Perhaps we have that duty, a duty which follows another very hard moment which is deciding when to euthanise your sick and dying cat companion.
Being with your cat at the end is part and parcel of the end of life struggle which cat guardians cannot waive away because it hurts too much.
Please tell me
Please tell me if you stay in that dreaded room during that awful moment. Or do you do what I did which is to sob quietly in the corner of the waiting room hoping that I don’t embarrass myself.
I am sorry to hear this. You’re brave and thanks for sharing.
I had to put my sweet boy down several years ago, at 18 &1/2, he was weak and wobbly the last day drooling and crying , i took him in and stayed with him every minute, stroking and petting him all the time till he was gone, then i cried my eyes out.