Dear Friend,

I am so, so sorry to hear about your beloved dog and your question is so poignant and heart-felt. What you are asking comes up so very often in the context of the Buddhist practice as we struggle to care for our animal friends.

In fact, I have often asked myself this question too. Over a year ago I lost my mare. She was young and it happened suddenly. I was out of town when she colicked suddenly. No one could reach me because I was out of cell phone range and the electricity where I was had gone out due to a storm. The vet wanted to put her down but my friend knew that I would want to give her the best fighting chance possible…so they waited. Meanwhile, they gave her morphine and she died on her own soon after.

When I brought home my most recent horse the question and responsibility has continued to weigh on me as I have wondered what I would do if such a thing were to happen again and the situation was prolonged. It has become normative to put down horses immediately when they can’t walk, as there is no way for them to actually survive. So I have to say, it is still a question for me. But I know I would do absolutely everything I could to make my horse, cat or dog comfortable and really give them the best fighting chance. Because animals do fight to survive…and they know how to let go when it’s time.

Obviously there is no easy answer for this question. I want to say there is kind of a Buddhist “rote” answer, and that would be “no” to euthanasia and “yes” to letting the animal die naturally. But I think the dharma goes much deeper than simply giving us “rote” answers. It is not that Buddhism “allows” or “doesn’t allow” anything. I don’t think it dictates what we “should” do but rather asks us to deeply examine cause and effect. And when our motivation is kind and loving, these choices are not so black and white. So I think no matter the circumstances there are consequences either way. You would have to be callous to not feel the consequences of putting down a being you love. And yet it can seem cruel to let them suffer unnecessarily at times. So the question itself requires us to be very big and courageous.

Sometimes we can find creative ways to work with this situation. I have a friend who asked me the same question some years back while her cat was dying of cancer. Her animal’s pain was almost too much to bear. But then she asked her vet to prescribe pain medication and that seemed to ease the pain enough to support them both to relax and allow her cat to die peacefully. It was an important experience for my friend to see her cat off in that way. She learned a lot about her ability to bear witness to that kind of struggle and she was grateful for her choice. She realized that yes there was suffering in the process both for her and her cat, but there were moments of relaxation, ease and great joy and love as well. She realized that they could not have shared these moments if she had decided to put the cat down.

As for the practice, the best practice is the practice of simply expressing love and care. You don’t have to say any foreign prayers. I think in these kinds of situations there is a lot we feel – not just suffering. I’m sure you are experiencing a great deal of love and appreciation for your dog, a sense of responsibility, the sadness of impending loss, the vulnerability of not being able to do anything to fix the situation, and the realization that life is so very full and therefore it is hard to know what to do sometimes. If you can rest with the fullness of all of that, your own fears and confusion around this may also dissipate and things will become much more clear. It usually works like that.