While I am completely against the euthanasia of a healthy animal, this is my personal view on euthanasia of critically injured animals without a quality of life.
Today, I read someone’s Facebook rant about another organisation that took a euthanasia decision on a paralysed kitten whose spine was completely damaged. While I am uncertain what investigations were done to determine the extent of damage, the kind of words that people were flinging around about euthanasia and calling themselves "animal rescuers" was outright ridiculous.
A cat with a broken spine will never live a half-decent life ever again. That cat would never be able to urinate or defecate on her own. Cats are clean creatures: imagine just involuntarily defecating and having to wait for a human to clean up her backside every single time for the rest of her life. And if the human gets late, the bacteria in it that causes rashes and sores would only aggravate her misery. Itchy to say the least, she can't even turn fully to lick herself to ease the discomfort. Also, imagine how excruciatingly painful it is when you want to pee but cannot go anywhere for hours -- the pressure drives you nuts, right? Now, imagine that happening to you all your life, because the cat can't really say "hey human, relieve my bladder right now." Can she even tell you what she feels and what she doesn't, who even knows what nerve sensations are present and which ones are dead. Nerve endings once dead, don't regenerate -- and while you can externally test the deep pain sensation in her leg, no test can tell you if she's feeling her bladder pressure or not.
Completely dependent on humans to put her in and out of her cart (because whichever one of you thinks a paralysed cat just lives full-time in a wheel cart, is absolutely wrong!). To top it all, imagine a helpless cat who has stuck herself in a corner, unable to back up on the wheel cart because she just cannot on her own. And after all that, imagine the chronic bedsores from dragging and immobility that she has to battle with all her life… and in the end, when the underlying chronic infections get to her thanks to her myriad of problems, only then can she go heaven. FINALLY.
Angry people on the post asked individuals who supported the call,
“Who are you to take someone's life?”
What I really felt like asking them is...
“Who are you to prolong her suffering?”
If only animals could speak, I'm convinced the kitten would have a lot more to tell you than me. Euthanasia, for the right reasons, is NOT CRUELTY, but making an animal suffer because of your selfish and misguided compassion of sentencing it to a life of misery, certainly is. It takes courage to make a euthanasia decision -- do you have it in you to deal with that? Or does your courage end at ranting on Facebook posts? I think so.