The painful process of losing a beloved animal
When Ann Maclean’s dog Seamus, a rescued black Labrador retriever, began to decline, she spoke with her veterinarian about the decision to say goodbye to the family’s cherished pet.
The Flint Hill resident scheduled a veterinary technician to come to their home on a Sunday, when she and her husband, Nick, could both be there with their sons.
“We canceled all our engagements and spent the weekend loving [Seamus] up,” she recalled.
Afterwards, the boys found sticks and cut twine to create makeshift crosses which they stuck in the ground, over the grave their father had dug.
Over the years Maclean has found beautiful stones on their property to also mark the site. “It’s sort of in the woods, by the stream where he loved to swim,” she said. “It feels like a nice little spot.”
The painful process, familiar to so many animal lovers, provided a bonding and teaching time for the family, Maclean said.
“Animals really help kids process hard things, and we wanted to help [our sons] have an open conversation about it,” she said. When Seamus died, “There was lots of crying, hugs and tears, telling the dog how much we loved him and going to visit the grave.”
Difficulty losing a pet
Anyone who has endured the death of a beloved pet can identify with political comedian Jon Stewart, who in his third week back hosting The Daily Show, broke up on camera Feb. 27 while telling the audience his dog, Dipper, had died the day before.
“Psychologists tell us that it can be as dicult to lose a pet as it can be a human member of your family,” Dr. Michael Watts of Clevengers Corner Veterinary Care in Amissville said.
Watts said a strong feeling of grief is common, largely because of the unconditional love pets give.
“[Pets] don’t criticize you like your spouse or yell at you like your kids,” he said. “They always love you, and so when you lose that, it can be a very big psychological trauma.”
Ellen Adams, of River Oaks Counseling and Wellness, a telehealth private practice in Virginia, believes that our culture doesn’t do a great job of helping people gure out how to grieve, let alone for pets.
“It can feel like it’s hard to nd support [from other people],” she said. “A lot of times the people in our lives, the sense might be, ‘get over it,’ which I think a lot of people do when you’ve got a human loss too. They can be like, ‘Do we still have to go through this? Are you still depressed?’”
Adams urges those suffering a pet loss to understand that their grief is valid, and to continue searching for those who will support them.
Grieving over horses, livestock
Dr. Thomas Massie Jr., of Rose Hill Veterinary Practice in Washington, said horses tend to engender those same kinds of emotions in owners as dogs and cats.
“And people don’t think about a cow, but [that cow] can also be critical to someone’s mental wellbeing and life,” he said. “However many dogs and horses you’ve had, you can probably name one or two that were the best. There’s always one that seems to be the hardest to let go.”
Massie described helping a 70-yearold dairy farmer handle the transition.
“He looked as hard as you could be, but there he was, sitting with his head in his hands, crying beside
Coping with grief over loss of pets, horses, cows
his 12-year-old dairy cow,” Massie said. “They’d been depending on each other for years. Every day they’d had physical contact, and he knew all the babies she’d had and how kind she was.”
That hurt is part of being human— and a caring animal owner, Massie said.
“It ought to hurt when you lose them, whether that’s a herd of cows or one horse. They’re a part of you; you had them for a reason,” he added.
Many livestock in Rappahannock are buried, although veterinarians can also provide options for cremation.
Massie said he had one of his own horses cremated individually, with the ashes returned in a ve-gallon bucket, at a cost of $1,200.
“The [cremation services are] very respectful of the people and the animals,” Massie said. “It’s a nice service to have, and it’s [become more popular] in the last 10 to 15 years.”
Before burying or removing a horse’s body, many owners follow the tradition of cutting a few inches of the tail hair as a keepsake.
“I do keep a chunk of tail hair o my horses,” said Sue Garvin of Sperryville, a lifelong animal lover who has had horses since she was 15. “The old timers used to say that let them go to heaven. I think if there is a heaven, they get to go there anyway.”
Preparing for the end
Massie understands the dicult decision owners face as their animals decline, but he tries not to inuence that decision beyond laying out the facts.
“Everybody draws the line of when it’s time to stop in a little dierent place, but for the most part, it’s fairly close,” he said. “We get to a place where there’s no way out. You can’t do more, and you have to stop even though you don’t want to.”
Watts said people usually worry about whether they’re acting too soon. But that concern oen conicts with their other desires—to not see the pet suer, and to say goodbye in a peaceful way.
He advised that it’s best not to wait for a crisis. “[You don’t want them] yelling out in pain or vomiting blood, or so miserable they stop eating,” Watts said.
Waiting robs pets of a peaceful farewell, Watts said, which is why so many pet deaths end up happening at emergency clinics.
“You want it to be a nice, sunny day, in your backyard, maybe in time for a kid to come home from college to say goodbye to a childhood friend,” he said.
“I can’t think of a single person who has come back and said, ‘I wish we’d waited another week.’ But I could ll a book with people who said I wish we’d done it earlier,” he added.
As a pet owner, Maclean appreciates a vet who will tell her when it’s time, even if that conicts with a tendency to want to “x” an animal or hold on as long as possible.
“It becomes excruciating [at the end] when you have a vet who just keeps giving you more solutions,” Maclean said.
Massie understands people who ask if he has any other way to treat their ailing animal.
“[Clients] want to know when they lay their head down at the end of the day that they did the best they could for the animals in their charge, and you can’t ask for more than that,” he said. “It’s not uncommon that they say, ‘Doc, what would you do?’”
Even then, Massie doesn’t necessarily say he would stop, but instead lays out the prognosis – a clear outline of what the treatment’s likely results will be.
For some of the horses he euthanizes, Massie has been their veterinarian for 25 to 30 years. The animal might be one he foaled or once saved from injury or accident.
“The [owners] know it hurts me, too,” he said. “You can’t detach from the situation. At some level I have to, but in the decision, they realize we’re standing together.”