Ever witnessed your pet die?

I remember one mid morning when a strange dog invaded our compound. It looked disoriented and fearless. Our dog went after the intruder and a fight ensued. We were quick to intervene and the strange dog vanished. I reasoned that it was a rabid dog and went into overdrive looking for a vet. He seemingly escaped unscathed but later, he had another complication and my granny killed him with a strong blow to the head. It took me a long time to recover from the sorrow e witnessing him die.

My very first hamster died on my palm after I got home from a vacation. I think she was waiting for me because my mother told me that she had been acting weird for a few days before I even arrived. When I rushed to see her and took her on my palm, she kind of just laid on my palm and stopped breathing after I snuzzled her fur with the tip of my nose as I always did. It was heartbreaking and remembering it still brings tears in my eyes. That was one of the most saddest things I've ever encountered.

I think that having you pet die when you are there is one of the saddest times in a person's life. We love our pets just like we do a family member, and it is often just as heartbreaking to watch them die as it would be to lose someone in your family, or even a close friend.
Sometimes, when a pet is dying, and suffereing, and there is nothing that you can do to ease the suffering, then having the pet put to sleep is the very last kindness that we can do for our beloved pet.
I have had to do this , and I think that if you can at least be there and hold your pet when the vet iss putting them to sleep, then your pet knows that he or he is being held and loved at the last minute of their life.
A few months ago, one of my close friends lost her little Pomeranian that she had owned for many years. Ruthie was just old, and she started having heart problems, and finally she developed some kind of seizures.
My friend was just too broken up to be with her, and since Ruthie also knew me very well, I was the one to go in to the vet's office and hold her while she passed over the Rainbow Bridge.

This is a sad thread but I will try to make my post sensible enough. In 2007, our first dog was suffering from renal failure. For days, the 10-year old Jedi wouldn't urinate and her tummy is bulging already. And pain was evident in her eyes for she looked like crying. On May 19 of that year, we summoned the vet for the mercy killing. After the first injection, Jedi stood up and went to her favorite spot in our living room, i.e. beside the computer table. And when the vet gave the second shot, Jedi fell asleep in a matter of seconds. I was holding her head before she fell into the eternal sleep. Literally, she died in my hands. That was one of the saddest days in my life.

When I was a kid, animal rights hasn't yet caught up in our area. We had a dog we named Pinky because of her pink nose, which was rare for us. We've had her for a number of years until she got too old to be a guard dog. We've been robbed twice and never once had we heard her bark. This gave my father an excuse to just close the gates on her saying she's full of ticks and fleas anyway.

Back then, there were no veterinary clinics anywhere nearby and the ones you can find are in Manila, which is at least a two-hour travel. She stayed just outside our gate, still hoping she would be let in until my dad found her dead one day. I'm embarrassed to say that I couldn't do anything back then because I was afraid of my dad and thinking about it now just makes me sad because I did love her.

I agree that watching a pet die has got to be one of the saddest experiences you can go through (in part because you feel so darn helpless, here's this suffering creature that has depended on you for everything and there's nothing you can do to save or even really comfort them) though fortunately for me I've never had to actually had to view the moment of death. The closest times I've come to it have been when I was very young. The first was one of my family's cats that caught distemper and died over a tense few days, and then I remember seeing another cat of ours right before my parents took him to the vet to be put down (he'd been hit by a car and was paralyzed from the shoulders down, my parents thought it best he didn't suffer anymore) I think that one was the worst. With our last family cat I was spared that agonizing last look as my mother tactfully took him away while I was at school. But by far the most heart wrenching and painful death to go through was the loss of me and my daughter's cat, Siamesey. He was barely over a year old and he was hit by a car on a busy road near where we lived. He managed to get back to the trail he used as his private shortcut to and from our home, before he succumbed to his injuries and died. My daughter was on spring break and she went to look for him because he didn't come home after we had been out all night at my mother's for her birthday. She came running back from looking for him, crying and saying that she'd found him and she thought that he was dead. I went back out with her and sure enough, there he was laying on his side in the middle of his favorite trail not a drop of blood on him but I could tell. I screamed and went up to him but he was already stiffening. I cried and so did my daughter. We had to hold each other up going back to the house. People seeing us would have thought we just saw our best friend dead and we did. I thought he'd been poisoned because of the lack of apparent injury but an autopsy showed that he had been hit at a high speed and was completely broken inside. It took forever to get over and for the longest time I couldn't think about him without crying. To help my young daughter get through it, I told her that God recycled cat's souls and that one day he'd be returned to us. Sometimes I think he has been in little ways with a couple of the cats both my daughter, now grown, and I have had. The cat I have now certainly has all of his attitude and intuitiveness, and I'm sure if its not him, he'd approve of Hank anyway.

Not yet. However, I had one cat before who died. She had been sick then. She was not eating and not even drinking water. One day, she left the house and never came back. One of my neighbors told me that she saw our cat in their backyard, dead. That was very sad. I don't understand, even until now, the reason as to why she had to run away on her last day.

Nobody likes having a pet die, but since few pets live as long as we generally do, that is going to happen at some point. I once held in my hand a tiny kitten suffering from a bite to his neck. An adult cat had tried to kill it, and the wound was deep enough that eventually the little one did die, but not until he had suffered considerably. That was my first experience with a pet's death, and I was just a child at the time. My mom had me hold the kitten while she rushed to call the veterinarian, but if I remember correctly, by the time we got the kitten over there it was already too late. Over the years, we've had a few animals put down, and that is the saddest thing ever, but sometimes it just has to be done. Some of our pets have died at home, while others have wandered off to die elsewhere. My mom recently found some dead kittens in the shed behind her house. It nearly broke her heart as she is the world's biggest cat lover, but there was nothing that could be done. The mother cat was missing from the site, and we assume that she either got hit by a car and killed or had tried to fight off a wild animal and had been killed in the process. Without a mother, the little ones only lived a little while. It's sad, but this sort of thing happens in nature all the time.

Our pets can become just like one of the family, and it is often very painful to us when we lose one of these beloved pets, or have to make the tragic decision to have one put to sleep because they are suffering.
When they are hurting, and there is no hope of saving the pet, then sometimes having them put to sleep is the last kindness that we can give them and show our love for them.
It is hard to imagine the cruelness of some people who have no feeling for animals, and they suffer a needless death.
Here, we have a lot of people who just move and leave their pets, or maybe turn them in to the animal control to try and rehome them. Often, these animals are also killed when they are at the shelter because there is no home found for them.

Because of my age (71), I always worry about what would happen if I die before my beloved Chipper dies. He is about 13 years old, so he is not a young dog, either, and while I do not want to see him die, it is even more worrisome about what would he do if I should die first.
Even though he would still be taken care of, I know that he would be broken-hearted if I were not there. I have had him all of his life and he is morose when I am gone for even a little while.
Even though I hate the thought of losing Chipper, I want to be the one to hold him in my arms when he breathes his last breath.