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“I have a pit/border mix. She is so smart, she herds our other golden/lab mix around plus the cats, its funny to watch she is very affectionate with our daughters new babies.”

Our border collie ‘Mindy’ was dropped from doggie school when she was 6 months old. She wanted to herd all of the other ‘students’ all the time instead of concentrating on her school work.:)

Anyway she is sitting next to me this morning. She will still get up and head to her food bowl and take care of her business outside with some help from me by holding her harness to steady her.

She is unsteady on her feet which for a dog approaching 16 years-old in two months is normal. The problem though is that she over the past three years has had an attack of canine vestibular disease each year each lasting a couple of weeks, but with cortisone and dizziness pills she always bounced back to herself. However this time her head tilt is permanent, so imagine yourself trying to navigate the world looking ahead with your head tilted and on a set of weak legs.

Vestibular Syndrome
http://www.vara.org/VestibularSyndrome.htm

We had scheduled a day to have the vet put her down a month ago, but she must have heard us talking through our tears and she got up on her feet and walked over to her water bowl. So we cancelled the appointment.

Anyway we are giving her a lot of personal attention. We are retired so we can help her a lot, but we don’t know how long she will be able to continue to get up on her feet. I know that it will be time to say goodbye when she can no longer do that.:(

It's very hard to make the decision to put your best friend down. I had to put our old cat down last year, she was 22 years old. There was no way she was going to make it another day or so. I felt horrible. Wondering if I was making the right decision. Thinking maybe I should have done it a few weeks earlier before she got so bad.

I've prayed often asking God where our pets go. Do they just die and that's the end of them? Or do they go to heaven? After asking Him and contemplating about it, knowing who God is, I'm convinced they go to heaven. My reason being is, they were created by God for his pleasure as well as ours. Why wouldn't He bring them back to Himself? And He also know's our hearts and what's important to us, is important to Him. He is after all our loving merciful Father, He loves us more than we can ever comprehend and He loves His creation more than we can comprehend.