I wish I had put my anxious dog down sooner

Last May I sat on the floor of my kitchen with my husband and our vet, sobbing and holding onto the now-peaceful body of my first dog, Jess. 

After months managing the symptoms of a brain tumour we had made the difficult decision to put her to sleep. We’d planned a weekend doing her favourite things, feeding her seafood and cuddling on the sofa but in the end she was suffering too much so we brought forward her euthanasia.

Watching her fall asleep for the last time was a relief. The stress and pain left her body and we were able to share a moment of calm with our sleeping girl before she left us. 

Little did I know that, just three weeks later, I’d be making the same decision for my other dog, Otto. 

Knowing when to let your dog go is notoriously difficult and was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make. And yet the fact that 91% of dog deaths in the UK involve euthanasia means it’s a decision most of us will have to face. 

Talking with my Instagram followers in the months since our dogs passed, I discovered that it’s rare to find someone who feels they got the timing right.  

I know I certainly have regrets – the main one being that, in both my dogs’ cases, I wish we’d done it sooner. 

Otto, an Italian Greyhound, was 18 months old when he came to live with us after a frightening fall-out with another dog in his household. 

While we’d been told that he was scared of being touched or approached, within a few days of bringing him home we realised that Otto’s problems were far more extreme than we suspected. In fact, it soon became clear he was terrified of us. 

If he sensed our attention on him he’d often be so frightened that his body would tremble and his knees would knock together. He was also too scared to let us take his collar on and off or attach his lead.  

To try and establish trust, we took it in turns to sleep on an airbed in our kitchen with him for the first two weeks. But all he’d do was eye us warily from the other side of the room. 

On a couple of occasions he crept into bed with me at night, only to scream and bolt if I moved unexpectedly in my sleep.  

Desperate to help him any way we could, we took him to our vet but it was quickly apparent that physical exams, scans and tests would only traumatise him further.

Luckily, our vet helped us to start Otto on a course of anti-anxiety medications. They seemed to take the edge off slightly – enough to make us want to explore more.

Then, with the help of a clinical behaviourist from the Royal Veterinary College, we tried and tested treatment options to see what he would respond to.  

From what we could tell, Otto’s brain appeared to be malfunctioning, flooding him with stress hormones. It explained why he was spending hours each day in fight or flight mode, skidding around the house and screaming at sudden movements. 

For a year we experimented with different medications, developing a complicated routine to make sure he got what he needed at the right times of day.

There were times we thought it might be working but they were always short-lived and followed by dramatic regressions. The shrieking would worsen, he would barely eat and the only times we saw him were when he skidded out of a room, panicked, as we walked in.

Finally, as we hadn’t seen much improvement with Otto, our vet raised euthanasia as an option.  

To help us make the decision our behaviourist encouraged us to try to measure Otto’s quality of life on a scale from ‘a life worth living’ to ‘a life worth avoiding’. And when we did, the balance between positive and negative experiences in his life was strongly weighted towards the negative. 

The reality was that, some days, we still weren’t able to get close enough to attach his lead to his collar so he couldn’t even leave the house – and what life is that for a dog? 

Still, we had fallen in love with Otto and our hearts broke at the thought of euthanising him at only two years old. Rather than put him out of his misery we decided to keep trying. But then, when Jess died, everything changed.   

Otto lost the only uncomplicated relationship in his life overnight. He went off his food and spent long periods without eating, which meant we couldn’t administer his medication. 

We bought steaks, sausages, cheese, fish and tried everything to get his pills down him, often unsuccessfully. And without food and water he soon became physically ill, gradually spending more and more time in a state of unmedicated panic. 

Now we were forced to confront that every day he spent in that state was a cruelty that we could save him from. 

As we grappled with the decision our behaviourist told us something that has stuck in my mind ever since: ‘it’s better to euthanise your pet a day too soon than a moment too late’.  

I wish I’d been brave enough to do that, instead, we were still trying to reconcile ourselves with the decision when, on a particularly bad day, our vet told us firmly, but gently, that it was time to say goodbye.