By Jason Banning, D.V.M.
Veterinary Lead

Medical euthanasia decisions are an unfortunate reality of working in animal welfare. Every day, animals come into our shelter spanning an entire health spectrum, from perfectly healthy to already deceased. Deciding which animals are beyond our ability to help is an agonizing yet regular decision we are forced to consider.

As an organization focused on preventing and relieving animal suffering, we are obligated to pursue any means to reach that goal. In most cases, this means providing veterinary care such as pain medication, antibiotics, or other treatments to resolve an animal’s issues and improve his/her quality of life. Even during an animal’s stray hold period, we will provide whatever care is needed to keep an animal from experiencing pain or suffering until the owner reclaims the animal and take them to their veterinarian, or the stray hold expires and we can continue care in our facility.

There are some animals, unfortunately, who arrive already beyond what medical care we can provide. These animals are always promptly evaluated by one (or, if possible, multiple) of our staff veterinarians to determine if the animal is too sick, too injured, too medically complex for our facility, or suffering from terminal, non-treatable conditions.
In these cases, we still attempt to explore any options alternative to euthanasia, such as hospitalizing at a clinic that can provide 24-hour care or transferring to a partner organization with resources specific to these cases that may be able to help where we cannot.

Even in cases where we know the animal is ultimately beyond our ability to fully rehabilitate and adopt, we will still attempt to keep a stray animal comfortable while searching for the owner, provided we can do so while not prolonging an animal’s suffering.

Sadly, some animals arrive in such a state that our veterinary team cannot treat the condition and do not believe they can keep the animal comfortable while we search for an owner. In these scenarios, and only at the discretion of our veterinarians, we may decide that humane euthanasia is our only option to ensure an animal does not suffer needlessly. Fortunately, these cases are uncommon as we are constantly working to improve and expand on the number of animals and magnitude we can help, but that makes these situations no less painful for our team and the community.