So was dad's last Shepherd, Zarek. Toddlers in the family and a Fourth of July weekend at the cabin, dad wasn't about to risk the toddlers getting innocently bit by Zarek if they were to have patted him on his hind quarters..............
So I was given the task of taking him to the vet to be put down......Worst F'n day of my life that I still can't get out of my mind........
When I was too young for such things, my dad had me take his Brittany, Duke, to the needle because he “couldn’t bear to do it”.
Scarred me for life because the vet effed it up and Duke screamed and thrashed around.
That was hell for a young dog-loving kid.
I’ve had the sorrow of it with 3 other dogs and only one of them, Pookie the Ibizan Hound, was a thing of “joy”.
She had degenerative myelopathy and I carried her 90 pound butt outside to potty for almost a year, after it rendered her unable to walk very well, but she was otherwise happy to lounge around and be spoiled rotten, literally waited on hand and paw.
Every day I asked her “Today the day, Pook?” and she’d thump her tail and “chuckle”, smiling and I knew the answer was “No” and that went on every day until that day she didn’t chuckle or smile.
The vet came to the house and he started to do it and she was just gone.
I felt her “fly” out of her body and I told him “She’s gone” and he said it was impossible because he hadn’t even given her much sedative yet.
He checked her several times and she was indeed gone.
I was crying HARD but it was happy tears.
I felt her fly out of her useless body and I knew where she was going, to be with her beloved sister and constant companion, Phoebe, who had passed 7 months before.
I felt her happiness and freedom and joy and that she was running to Phoebe.
I know that makes me sound like a right lunatic but it is what it is and was as real as real ever gets.
They DO go somewhere.
The other two needle stories, I do not want to talk about.
And I look over at a noise just now, and my Dobe Boy is lazily gnawing a soup bone he must’ve found in his toy box and I swear, I would give 10 years of my life if only it would buy 10 more years for him.