Animal Euthanasia - Mercy or Murder?

I signed a death warrant today. My first. She was barely a month old.

She was the feeblest of the six siblings born in my office premises. For the past few days, I’d been feeding her milk and bread. The results had been encouraging. Her bulging, big black eyes no more threatened to pop out of their socket. She had grown increasingly competitive against the siblings for her mother’s milk. Her gait had progressed from tottering to walking on the cobble path where she was born. In short, she’d gone from looking like a genetically-altered mouse gone wrong, to a real puppy. The increased pace of walking meant I had to often run after her to protect her from the vehicles passing by. I didn’t mind doing it, though; those tiny paws never took her far and her lighter-than-feather, mud-stained white body fitted in the length of my palm. The wagging of the thin, short tail whenever I picked her up was an added incentive.

Today I found her on the cobble path - prostrate on her right side, shaking uncontrollably. Her big eyes were shut tight and there were yellow white stains on the mouth, probably from dried up vomit and froth. A guy sitting nearby said nonchalantly that he’d been observing her in that state for over half an hour – “kisi ne gaadi chadha di hogi.” But I knew she hadn’t been run over. She wasn’t squealing at all and there were no injury marks.

In the car, she kept sneaking underneath the seat where I sat. At the hospital I had to drag her out by the tail when the lure of biscuits and a pat on the head proved futile. This time, though, the tail didn’t wag as she remained motionless in my arms. Once inside the hospital, her movements were completely incoherent – she was crouching, darting backwards more than forwards, and falling over repeatedly. The only moment of sanity was when she snuck into the V made by my shoes while I was standing, speaking to the doctor. I have a picture of the moment, but I will avoid putting it here.

The doctor said she didn’t have more than a week to live. It would be a gruesome death. Uncontrollable seizures, incoherent actions, and frothing at the mouth were symptoms of the last stage of distemper – a brutal canine killer.

The doctor and I agreed that euthanasia was the best option. Taking her back would infect the entire family. Leaving her anywhere else would mean death, either from the disease, or from causes ranging from starvation to a mauling by other dogs.

As a last ditch attempt to keep her alive, I took her to a dog-friendly NGO. But they refused to keep her because she would infect every other dog they had. Had she been human she’d have felt pretty unwanted right about then. Maybe she felt it anyway.

They brought a piece of paper with the words “PTS” scribbled on it, and asked for my consent, so that she could be Put To Sleep. That’s when I signed her death warrant.

To be honest, it turned out far easier for me than I imagined. Her condition checked all the boxes that justify euthanasia. Immeasurable suffering – check; imminent death – check; absence of caretakers – check.

In retrospect, it wasn’t. If it were, I’d have held her in my arms till her very last moment, making her feel wanted – to the extent possible – as humans killed her without her knowledge. I would have been there to calm her down as she flinched for the last time at the feeling of something sharp poking her. I didn’t do that. Instead, I left her to her fate after signing her death warrant. Being by her side would have been too much to bear, though I did stress upon them, twice, that she be given a painless death.

That humans treat non-humans as inferior comes as no surprise, but to think human euthanasia is allowed in very few jurisdictions - strictly with prior consent of the patient, except in the rarest of rare cases - while animal euthanasia is rampant in every corner of the world must be disturbing at least to some. The reasoning is that since animals, or their families, can’t give consent – at least not in the form humans would understand – we should choose on their behalf given our higher intelligence.

The above reasoning is on morally shaky ground, for it neglects the fact that animals can’t consent because they simply won’t consent - for lack of intelligence or otherwise – to being killed. They would much rather rot to death than kill themselves. This is apparent from the fact that animals never commit suicide, or kill one of their own in deep suffering. Whatever little evidence exists in favour of this is far from conclusive. Humans, on the other hand, commit suicide by the lakhs every year. So, while humans might want to end their lives under certain circumstances, animals simply don’t.

Let’s think of some humans who would never want to kill themselves, no matter how wretched their lives – mentally challenged? babies? Hmm, we don’t call putting them to sleep ‘euthanasia’. We call it murder. Humans murder uncountable animals for entertainment, food, money, and sometimes because they’re ugly or boring, so why shy away from calling this particular act, murder?

The reason has to do with keeping our conscience clear. Some humans are kinder than others - just enough to not be able to live with an animal’s blood on their hands, but not enough to care for it when it’s terminally-ill. In the context of animals, PTS/euthanasia are clever terms invented by this class of humans.

I, of course, am one of them. Given that distemper doesn’t affect humans, it was perfectly possible for me to take the puppy back to my place and care for her till her last day. But that would have taken time away from writing this piece, or reading a book, or a morning run. To avoid the trouble, I chose to murder, oops, euthanize her, and convinced myself that I chose the best for her, not for myself. My not holding her tight while she died confirms this self-deception – doing so would have made the murder all too real. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that euthanasia and euphemism share the first two letters.

Though I supported Aruna Shanbaug’s euthanasia back when the case was being heard, I am now glad that the SC didn’t buckle down. The woman was comatose and couldn’t have consented. If in future we do euthanize someone without their consent, let’s all just accept that we were too bored with taking care of them, or with spending our money/taxes on them.

I went back to the office after murdering her. The mother was sniffing around, probably looking for her daughter who was whisked away and later murdered by a group of conspiring humans, without her knowledge. The siblings were running after the mother to catch hold of her dangling breasts, blithely delighted that there was now one less competitor.