Keeping an older infirm pet alive because it will hurt you to lose them... is not right. Let them go quietly into that sweet embrace of sleep.

'we are all animals' doesn't apply here, all animals have developed unique traits that help them survive, for humans one of these traits is our ability to think in the long-term, we have self-awareness to help us describe our experience to other members of our community, most animals including dogs do not have this because they have no use for it, or at least do not display any evidence of it, it's just plain anthropomorphising.

if an animal loses all of it's limbs it doesn't think that the rest of it's life will be miserable, it might not even realize their limbs are gone until they try to stand on it again, this is why horses are put down when they break a leg, they keep trying to stand on it and as a result the injury never heals, they live entirely in the moment and don't plan ahead, pain as humans experience doesn't occur in most species, they engage in nociception which is the nerve system reacting to negative stimuli, pain is the conscious and subjective experience of this.

/r/unpopularopinion Thread Parent