Patterico's Pontifications

5/23/2019

Healthy Pet Dog Is Euthanized So It Can Be Buried With Deceased Owner

Filed under: General — Dana @ 6:10 am

[guest post by Dana]

Emma, a healthy Shih Tzu mix, was euthanized recently because her owner left explicit instructions in her will: The fur baby was to be put down — and laid to rest with her.

“Heartbroken” shelter volunteers at Chesterfield County Animal Services — where Emma had a two-week reprieve from death — said she was a well-bred, pampered and much-loved pup. They appealed to the executor of the dead woman’s estate, begging them to not go through with ending Emma’s life — but their pleas were ignored.

“We did suggest they could sign the dog over on numerous occasions — because it’s a dog we could easily find a home for and re-home,” Carrie Jones, manager of Chesterfield County Animal Services, tells WWBT NBC. “But ultimately, they came back in on March 22nd and redeemed the dog.”

Emma was taken directly to a vet to be euthanized. After she was cremated, her ashes were placed in an urn and returned to the “authorized representative of the estate,” following her owner’s last wishes to the letter.

Note: While Virginia state code prohibits burying animals with humans in commercial cemeteries, there are exceptions for final resting spaces that are family-owned.

According to reports, a number of veterinarians said that putting a healthy dog down just so it can be buried with its deceased owner is not ethical, and they would not fulfill such a request.

–Dana

Comments (27)

27 Responses to “Healthy Pet Dog Is Euthanized So It Can Be Buried With Deceased Owner”

I couldn’t locate the name of the veterinarian who put the dog to death. Apparently they had no moral conflict about doing so.
Dana (779465) — 5/23/2019 @ 6:16 am
Shades of the Vikings! Was the “cremation” on a burning longship floated out to the Atlantic?
nk (dbc370) — 5/23/2019 @ 6:20 am
Some people are convinced their loved ones will not be able to function without them. There’s a similar mind-set in women who abort their babies rather than give them up for adoption, because they think no one will ever love them as much as they do.
Chuck Bartowski (a2c25f) — 5/23/2019 @ 6:58 am
You bring up an interesting point, Chuck Bartowski, and one I was going to blog about but will comment here. The Atlantic has a piece up about women choose abortion over adoption in the vast majority of cases. From the piece:

The mothers who did choose adoption ultimately reported that they were happy with their decision. But Sisson told me that, at least initially, “adoption can be deeply traumatic. Uniformly, the birth mothers experience grief after placement. It’s a very hard choice and one that a lot of women are not interested in making.”

In the study, several women expressed an unwillingness to part with a baby they had carried to term and given birth to. “I had too many feelings for her to give [her] to someone I barely knew,” one woman said. Some said they would feel guilty placing their children with adoption agencies, and one even imagined the fully grown child coming back one day and interrogating her about her choice. “By the time they are delivering the child, women feel bonded to their pregnancies and their children,” Sisson said.

Sisson also performed a small study on mothers who placed their children with adoption agencies from 1962 to 2009. These women, she writes, were also largely choosing between abortion and parenting. “Rarely was adoption the preferred course of action; it emerged as a solution when women felt they had no other options,” Sisson wrote. Even among these women, who were not recruited from abortion clinics, a majority of the participants described their adoption experiences as “predominantly negative.” Most of the negative experiences involved “closed” adoptions, in which the birth parents have no contact with the child. Today, “open” adoptions are more common, and many experts and families believe that they create healthier situations for parents and children. But arguably every kind of adoption comes with its own complications.

Sisson’s findings echo a study published in 2008 of 38 women who were getting abortions. It found that a quarter of the women had considered adoption, but they largely regarded it as too emotionally distressing. “Respondents said that the thought of one’s child being out in the world without knowing whether it was being taken care of or who was taking care of it was more guilt inducing than having an abortion,” wrote the authors, who are researchers from the abortion-rights think tank the Guttmacher Institute. In another Guttmacher study of women seeking abortions, in 2005, one-third of women considered adoption but “concluded that it was a morally unconscionable option because giving one’s child away is wrong.”

The nonsensical belief that only the woman can love her baby enough, so rather than have give it up for adoption, she’d rather end its life; the fear of being confronted later by an angry teenager or adult who was given up for adoption is too much to bear, so she’d rather end its life; concern and worry over where their baby was and how it was being treated was too much to bear would make them feel more guilt than ending the baby’s life; it’s morally unconscionable to put a child up for adoption because it seen as “giving it away”. These are such irrational conclusions when used to justify aborting the baby instead. Notice too, that the terms “baby” and “child” being used. Also, all of the reasoning is incredibly self-serving and if looked at closely, not seriously focused on the needs of the baby but rather it’s all about the on the needs/wants of the woman.
Dana (779465) — 5/23/2019 @ 7:20 am
4. I can’t wrap my mind around a situation — any situation, really — in which a woman feels less guilt for killing her baby than for giving it/him/her up for adoption. That anyone could consider the murder of an unborn innocent a reasonable recourse strikes me as one of the most egregious symptoms of our cultural rot.
Gryph (08c844) — 5/23/2019 @ 7:46 am
These Medeas adopted six children and killed them along with themselves.
nk (dbc370) — 5/23/2019 @ 8:04 am
6. Okay. What’s your point in bringing that up? Is that supposed to be even more morally reprehensible than killing an unborn child? Is this supposed to be some kind of illustration of why adoption is a bad idea, and abortion is preferrable? SMDH
Gryph (08c844) — 5/23/2019 @ 8:06 am
Gryph,

Euthanizing a pet and abortion seem like emotional decisions to me, so they aren’t about being reasonable. They are about feelings.

That doesn’take the decisions morally right but how often do people worry about morality anymore? People worry about how they feel, and doing the morally right thing often causes pain or hardship.
DRJ (15874d) — 5/23/2019 @ 8:12 am
8. That’s kind of my point. How you feel does not determine the moral correctness of a course of action…
.
.
.
…unless you’re a libwit. Then how something makes you feel is the first, last, final, and only arbiter of morality.
Gryph (08c844) — 5/23/2019 @ 8:14 am
And I’ll at this time I’ll add:

People, many otherwise right-thinking people even, are more hit in the feels by the death of an animal than they are by the death of an unborn child. I hold this up as another symptom of cultural rot. If Bob Barker had spent 1/4 the time advocating for children as he has for “animal rights…”

Just SMH.
Gryph (08c844) — 5/23/2019 @ 8:16 am
6. Okay. What’s your point in bringing that up?

“Medeas” should have given you a clue. Evil women have been killing their children for as long as people can remember.
nk (dbc370) — 5/23/2019 @ 8:25 am
That’s also an example of the ills of intersectionality – TheRoot.com should have been, but was not, all over that story.

And I’ve come to realize that there’s a positive correlation between racism and intensity of pet ownership.
urbanleftbehind (8da684) — 5/23/2019 @ 8:36 am
11. True. But evil people have been doing all sorts of evil things since the beginning of time. It’s the government sanction of evil that chills me to the bone even more than evil’s existence.
Gryph (08c844) — 5/23/2019 @ 8:39 am
I don’t think relying on feelings is a liberal concept anymore.
DRJ (15874d) — 5/23/2019 @ 8:50 am
The Shih Tzu might’ve been the result of rape or incest.
Munroe (809f2e) — 5/23/2019 @ 8:55 am
Well done, Munroe.
DRJ (15874d) — 5/23/2019 @ 8:59 am
15 – that’s most dogs…can we apply that standard to the pit bull?
urbanleftbehind (a9ef3a) — 5/23/2019 @ 9:36 am
are more hit in the feels by the death of an animal than they are by the death of an unborn child

Gryph (08c844) — 5/23/2019 @ 8:16 am

It’s even worse than that. Some people are more upset by the death of an animal than a citizen at large.
norcal (ce7ce7) — 5/23/2019 @ 11:06 am
“die like an Egyptian”
Harcourt Fenton Mudd (6b1442) — 5/23/2019 @ 6:21 pm
I can’t wrap my mind around a situation — any situation, really — in which a woman feels less guilt for killing her baby than for giving it/him/her up for adoption.

It’s easy — too much trouble carrying it to term. They’ve got things to DO!
Kevin M (21ca15) — 5/23/2019 @ 7:00 pm
I can’t wrap my mind around a situation — any situation, really — in which a woman feels less guilt for killing her baby than for giving it/him/her up for adoption.

I knew someone who told me that (in the past) she couldn’t give up a baby but it was another thing to have an abortion. That she could live with. It was another thing to have a baby out there.
Sammy Finkelman (102c75) — 5/24/2019 @ 2:12 pm
21. I still can’t wrap my mind around it. You feel guilty about “having a baby out there,” but not about killing a defenseless child? If that’s how you really feel about having a kid and giving it up for adoption, I think a little introspection is called for.
Gryph (884aab) — 5/25/2019 @ 6:22 am
I understand that feeling. It is not reasonable or Christian or right, but I understand feeling that way.
DRJ (15874d) — 5/25/2019 @ 6:53 am
23. What’s right is very seldom easy, and what’s easy is very seldom right.
Gryph (884aab) — 5/25/2019 @ 7:19 am
Maybe. I agree if you are saying that doing what is right isn’t always what we feel like doing. But in this case I think there is another element.

My family has a rare genetic disease that is life-threatening. It was discovered around 15 years ago. Now we know what killed several people in my family, but during their lives their problems were medical mysteries. There is no cure and limited treatments but at least now we know why it is happening.

As bad as this disease is, the “not knowing” was the hardest part of it and, to me, that would be the worst part of giving up a baby — you won’t know what would happen to it. But I completely agree adoption is right. If you don’t want to deal with this situation, the answer isn’t abortion. The answer is not to get pregnant. (And isn’t that the real basis of the rape/incest exception? Consensual sex is a choice but they aren’t.)
DRJ (15874d) — 5/25/2019 @ 7:40 am
I still can’t wrap my mind around it. You feel guilty about “having a baby out there,” but not about killing a defenseless child? If that’s how you really feel about having a kid and giving it up for adoption, I think a little introspection is called for.

I can totally understand how excruciating it must be to give up one’s baby, even if you believe it is the best thing for said baby. There is still the actual physical handing over of the little bundle. I suspect that the act can literally breaks a woman’s heart, given the intense emotions and hormone surges after birth. I have nothing but great respect for women who choose to do that, and have the strength to follow through on the decision. It is the best evidence that they have chosen not to be selfish but to have put the needs of their babies before their own. This unlike the reasons given at The Atlantic article linked at #4, including feeling guilty that their baby is “out there”. Yes, your baby is out there, but your baby is alive and wanted.
Dana (779465) — 5/25/2019 @ 9:28 am
26. Ditto the great respect. I can totally understand the unease and difficulty in giving up a child. What I can’t understand is how killing a child somehow assuages a guilty conscience. That is what I have a hard time wrapping my mind around. But I am male, I don’t have any children of my own (and may not ever), so my failure to understand this is probably a reflection of my own biases. I have no trouble with admitting that.
Gryph (884aab) — 5/25/2019 @ 9:53 am

5/23/2019

Healthy Pet Dog Is Euthanized So It Can Be Buried With Deceased Owner

27 Responses to “Healthy Pet Dog Is Euthanized So It Can Be Buried With Deceased Owner”

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