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Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to The Houndation’s podcast. I’m your host, Tony Peterson, and this episode is all about trying to do the right thing when we have to make the worst decision that dog owners are likely to face. I think that one of the greatest injustices of our modern life is the reality that even if our dogs end up living as long as dogs can, it’s never long enough. Getting you know, ten or twelve years out of a dog is a gift, but also an absolute heartbreaker, and the end rarely comes with them slipping away overnight. Instead, it’ll usually involve some level of breakdown of their minds and for sure their bodies. It’s is tough to deal with. Obviously, we have an obligation to them to recognize when it’s time. That’s what this episode is all about. The average life span of a labrador retrieved or depends on coat color. Black and yellow labs average eleven to thirteen years. Chocolate’s a shade under eleven. German short hairs have an average life span of twelve to fourteen years. The same goes for Britney Spaniels. German wire hairs are right there too, at about thirteen years. Golden retrievers make it to the ten to twelve year mark usually. Now, a crazy side note on that one is that represents a decline from a few decades ago, when you could have at least had a somewhat reasonable expectation a golden retriever might make it to sixteen or even seventeen years old. Think about that for a second. No, in fact, think about that and the chocolate lab life expectation that I just brought up as well. There’s a big lesson in there on genetics, a lesson in there on how much weight pure bread actually carries these days, and probably some stuff I’m missing. I’ll put a little finer point on this by saying that the average life span of a mix next breed dog is about fourteen years. Artificial selection with domestic canines is the reason we have so many amazing breeds to choose from, but also the reason why some of our breeds are genetic dumpster fires and others will be in a matter of time. I’ve gotten into that enough, though, and that’s not what this episode is about. Although you can’t really talk about end of life care without at least acknowledging how quickly you’re likely to get there when you go pick up your next puppy. The thing about us, silly humans, is that we can imagine the pain at the end of a dog’s life when we do go get that puppy, even if we’ve gone through the whole thing before a time or two. I think maybe in there somewhere is the secret to why we love dogs so much. I can wake up in the morning and I have two female black labs who will greet me with wagging tails and genuine excitement. Sure they recognize that their breakfast is about to be served, which is no small event for them, considering they are labs. But they’re just consistent. They’re genuinely positive almost all of the time. They don’t care that the bombs are flying in the Middle East again, or that the dollar doesn’t buy nearly what it did six years ago, or that we have all been tricked into addiction on a wide scale through crafty programming that works to undermine the reward centers in our brain that are meant to ping when we kill a rabbit for breakfast, and not when we see some curated propaganda about people we are supposed to hate, because if we do, we’ll stay on certain platforms where we can be fed NonStop advertisements. They don’t care. Want to lay on the floor and scratch their bellies. Hell, yes, go for a walk. Yep, Go toss a dummy around the park. Uh huh, go chase some roosters around in the crp Oh. Hell yes, they don’t care. They want to hang out and do stuff and they always will and that’s just not how our human interactions go. Life with a dog is the stripped down, raw relationship based on just being together and doing whatever. If you’re lucky, you’ll get that with an individual dog for at least a decade. Then that best friend, and they are best friends. As much as I don’t want to be confused with the fur baby movement. They’ll die and we will think all of the things we think when they do leave us. We will think, I’m never going to put myself through that again, and we mean it in that moment, a moment that can last a long time, because grief isn’t something like hunger, where we can feel it, address it in a matter of a few minutes, and then no longer have to feel it. It’s chronic, or at least kind of chronic. Adjacent and boy does it suck. My last dog, a Golden Retriever. She made it to just six years old, and I thought that nothing I do with dogs will ever be as painful as having to put down a prime age dog. While I’m on that doorstep with Luna, my older lab who past prime age a while ago, and who in April will be thirteen. It’s to the point where I don’t count on an extra month with her as a certainty, but I look at it with crossed fingers and toes as a little gift I might get if I get real lucky. Now, luck’s the golden You know. She had that typical golden attitude that she was as human as you or I, and that she should be treated in such a way. She’d hold a grudge, you know, if you left her home when she felt like you shouldn’t have, which was about every time you left. She’d show her displeasure by finding a tissue or something in the garbage or on the counter, and she’d chew it up and leave it for you at the top of the stairs. You always knew she had done that when you walked into the entryway and there wasn’t a Golden Retriever bouncing around, super excited to see you. She ate crayons, cash, money, you name it. She was quirky as they all are, and that made her absolutely endearing to us. She retrieved pheasants and grouse and woodcock and ducks and squirrels and rabbits and shed antler’s for me. In some ways, that dog saved my marriage, and in some ways I think she saved my life. When she started to not eat her dinner and occasionally I’d watch her with that thousand yard stare, she showed me that something was wrong. Now. The first veterinarian who saw her, smelled her breath, announced matter of factly that she was going through kidney failure and that our timeline was short. Now. That was the same veterinarian who chastised me for only getting one dog to replace Lux after she passed away, because, in her words, dogs need dogs to play with and entertain each other. And even when I told her I had twin babies at home and didn’t really need twin puppies, she acted like I was a bad dogler. I honestly think she was an anti hunter, And I’ll admit I saw her randomly a few months ago at the gym, and while I didn’t wish catastrophic injury on her, I thought I wouldn’t mind a little bit if she had just a slight muscle pull, or maybe she swallowed some water wrong and got a little in her lungs in that saying way where you really need to cough it all up, but you’re in public, so you try to sort of soft cough and it goes nowhere, and then suddenly you have a full coughing fit in people’s stare. I know that’s petty, but I don’t care. At the time of Lux’s diagnosis, we had to cook up some chicken and rice because she was just not eating kibble anymore. I was a full time writer then, with a couple of ghostwriting gigs as well as my own stuff, and one of the fellows who I wrote for told me to take Lucks to the University of Minnesota and their veterinarian department to get a second opinion. I did, and while they did a full expensive work up and it wasn’t kidney failure but that she was dying anyway, I took her home and realized for sure that the timeline we were supposed to get had been cut in half. They gave her a ten percent chance of making it a year. I was supposed to leave for Nebraska to bowhunt turkeys the day after that veterinarian trip, and I just knew it wasn’t going to happen. Three days later, Lux and I walk some ground that we had shed hunted and woodcock hunted and duck hunted a whole bunch while an early April blizzard came in sideways. And then I took her in and she hid under my legs at the vet clinic. I don’t think she knew what was happening, but I think she knew damn well that I knew something bad was happening and was hanging on by a thread. And then suddenly I didn’t have a dog. I went home and sat in my office chair, and my wife silently delivered a glass of whiskey to me, which she never did, because I delivered more than my fair share of whiskey to myself at that time of my life, and I quietly raged at the injustice of it all. I drank so much in that grieving period that it made me realize that I needed to stop. And at the end of the year, I did for good, and it’s been that way for the full lifetime of another dog. I always say that I quit for my daughters because I did, but I don’t know if I would have known I needed to if I hadn’t had to put that dog down when I did. A lot of people will tell you that your dog will just let you know when it’s time, and I kind of believe that, But I also believe a lot of times that happens not because the dog says they are ready, but because something in us recognizes that we are no longer capable of putting off the inevitable, that we can no longer ignore the back legs giving out, or the lumps that show up all over their bodies, or the whining when they can’t stand up and get out of their dog bet on their own. There is a certain kind of guilt that walks in lockstep with the breakdown of their bodies and their minds. The question of whether we are keeping them going for us, or because they can still be kept going. I can’t prove this because it’s not something that could be proven, but I bet almost every modern dog that’s ever been loved and hasn’t died quickly in some way has probably been kept around a little bit too long because the decision to put them down is that hard on us, and what if we do it too or I’m facing that with my lab Luna, and it sucks a lot. Part of it is selfish. Of course, When Tom Doc had called me up thirteen years ago and said that he had found my next dog, the arc of my entire life changed for the better. Now that dog is on death’s doorstep, and not only will it destroy me, it’s going to absolutely shatter my daughters, who have only known a life with her. I’d like to think having Sadie, our younger lab, will help, but I also feel that’s wishful thinking. Maybe it’ll take the edge off a little, But what’s the difference between a couple percentage points on the worst grief of their young lives. I’m banking on it being indistinguishable. I know I’m going to have to take lunan soon, and I wrestle with the big when she will still do a couple of retrieves. Absolutely love it if we run a hunt dead drill with the tail feathers off of a rooster from last season, and also just loves laying in the yard and sleeping in the sun. There’s joy still there, but to see it, I have to look past her limping and her whining and the occasional heavy panting that comes out of nowhere, And I know signals something I don’t want to acknowledge. She can still go up and down the stairs, will still kind of run in the right situation, and doesn’t seem to be in constant pain. But I’m also looking through heavily biased eyes, and I don’t trust myself. I would guess that just about anyone listening to this who has made the hard choice can relate. Now. While it’s up to us to do the right thing, there is also some rules that can just kind of help us along the way. With lucks, her refusal to eat almost anything after a while just a dead giveaway. That’s a good sign, or at least as good of a sign as you’ll get with most dogs. Terminal illness is another one, because you can track its progress and know that the direction it’s going is only going to go one way. When they lose their ability to walk, that’s another one that’s a hard one to witness, but when you see it, you know what it means. Pain real, uncontrollable pain, it’s another one. While dogs are masters at masking pain, partially because they just don’t feel sorry for themselves and they don’t have pity parties, but also because not that long ago in their history, if they risked showing weakness, they might find themselves losing their spot in the hierarchy of the pack, or worse, find themselves without a pack. Pain can be managed to a certain point through VET recommended medications and some over the counter options, but there’s only so much you can do, and if there is something unfair to a dog, it’s keeping them alive for our benefit while they are truly suffering. I say that knowing full well that doesn’t make things any easier. Trust me. Some dogs will let you know it’s time through aggression, which can come from cognitive decline or just a reaction to pain. This isn’t super common, and while on the surface it might sound like the likeliest condition to make it a little easier to put them down, it rarely work out that way, because not only do you have the tough decision, you have a dog you love very much suddenly turning on you and others, so there are more emotions rolled up into an already emotionally charge reality. For a lot of us sporting dog owners, the time to put them down might just be when we realized they no longer seem interested in the things they once were, you know, beyond food. Of course, this might mean retrieves, or just their favorite toys, or even cuddling with you on the floor when they can’t summon the energy to do the things they lived for not that long ago. They are probably telling you all you need to know, this is the tax we pay for having them in our lives. And while it doesn’t get easier, going through it once teaches you something, going through it twice changes you because you know that the thoughts you had after the first one where you were just not going to deal with that level of pain again, yet you do sort of reframes the grief. No one wants to do that to themselves because you’re truly losing a loved one. You know it going in, but you can’t really imagine it. It’s kind of like how you can’t understand how much you’ll love your children until you have them, and then you just understand something that was unreachable before with that first dog. It’s like the universe is showing you that you can only barely handle so much and it’s just not worth going through again. But if you do, and almost all of us do, you realize that it’ll always hurt that much, but that the ten or twelve years before that were worth it and they always will be. Because if you do right by a dog, which is so damn easy if you think about it, they’ll do right by you in a way that’s orders of magnitude more than we probably deserve. Because of that, we deserve to treat them right when they have aged into the last phase of their lives and they need a little extra grace and the hell of a lot of extra love and care. I know there are other factors in this reality, like veterinarian costs which are no joke, and the ability to just provide the care of your dog needs given that you still have to make a living and you have to do the things you need to do in order to take care of yourself and your family. There’s probably a million variables in there that I’m missing. But when we pick up that pup and we are thinking about what it’s going to do for us, and how many grouse or quail will shoot, and how nice it’ll be to have them to cheer us up and be there for us. We are also making a promise to them, not only that we will take care of them throughout their life, we will ease them into death, and if we really care about them, we will try to make that call for them when it’s the right time, and we will be there for them for that whole thing too, Because as painful as that is for us to have to do, I believe that we owe it to them to not only make the tough decision, but be there when they need us more than they ever have, no matter how much it threatens to break us, and it will for a long long time. It’s the deal we make, and I can tell you as I faced this in my very near future. It’s heavy, but also just a component of being a dog owner. I hope you have many years left with your four legged buddies, and when the time comes, you make the best decision you can for them. And if you question your timing or you feel guilty that you might be holding out to protect yourself, believe me that no one who loves dogs is judging you too harshly. We have all been there and if not, we will be That’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson and this has been the Houndation’s podcast. As I always, thank you so much for all of your support, all of us here at me. You truly appreciate it. We cannot thank you enough. If you need some more dog content, maybe you’re planning a trip out west to hunt Elk this year, Maybe just need some entertainment. You’re looking for a little education or recipe, some turkey hunting advice. Whatever, the mediat dot com has you covered. We publish new content every single day. Podcasts, films, articles, recipes, you name it, it’s all there. Go check it out at the mediat dot com and thank you once again for your support.
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