This week’s viewpoint is very meaningful for me. I am likely the only contributor who routinely performs euthanasia. As a veterinarian it is an unpleasant reality of the job. It has put me in a position where I must evaluate my own views on life, death, suffering and compassion. I’m sure many of you know this already, but I must say that Buddhists have a high regard for all life, human or otherwise. It is with that perspective that my job has presented me with some difficult questions. How does suffering affect the quality/value of life? At what point does suffering make life not worth living? Who has the right to decide? I have to confront these issues on a daily basis. Everyday people ask me to help them with these decisions, and everyday I am confronted with the religious implications of being a Buddhist and having to take an animal’s life.
I am honored that people trust me to help them with the final day of their animal’s life. They come to me when disease has stripped their companions of every last joy that life has to offer. Often their animals are incontinent, unable to walk, struggling to breathe, uninterested in food, unable to lift their head off of the ground. When people see their animals suffering in this way the decision to help them with the last stage of life comes a little bit easier. No one wants to see a loved one suffer continuously until their light flickers out in an agonizing dying breath. Compassion drives these individuals to my door where I attempt to give their friends a peaceful and dignified death. This is what I tell myself at work every day, I am bringing a suffering creature a death that is peaceful and dignified. I like to tell myself that this compassion, the desire to stop suffering, goes hand-in-hand with my Buddhist beliefs. I would like to believe that I am freeing animals from a world of suffering that they are already losing their grip on.
This daily reality makes my mind stray towards the moral dilemmas of my MD counterparts. In states such as Washington and Oregon, MDs are now asked to help human family members end their lives in the exact same way I am. I try to imagine children, mothers, fathers and siblings at the end of my needle, imagine how I’d feel if I was helping a husband say goodbye to his wife who has had her faculties robbed from her by some insidious disease. In my reflection I have found that I would feel the same, that my actions would be acts of compassion. While I do not envy my human medical counterparts, I believe that they are given a similar privilege. Euthanasia is a gift of compassion that we offer to our animal companions, why should deprive our human family of the same compassion. Should intelligence and speech doom us to a slow painful death? Would we want our closest family members to spend the last months of their life unable to control their bowels, confused, trapped within their body, unable to communicate, to hear, or to eat? Is it morally wrong to want to offer such individuals an escape? I believe that these people deserve the dignity of choice, and the respect of our compassion. As a Buddhist I have reverence for life, and it is within that reverence that I find a willingness to free other living creatures of their suffering.
