Thomas M. Reid

If you’ve ever had pets, and especially if you are a parent of children who enjoy the love of pets, this is going to make complete sense to you. It’s also probably going to smack you right between the eyes, as it did me when I first realized it. We recently lost a couple of our pet rats to cancer. By “lost,” of course, I mean we had to euthanize them. The first time your child has to lose a pet in this way, everyone will say, “Well, that’s one of those hard life-lessons that all kids have to learn; pets die.” But that’s not entirely true. That’s actually the easy lesson. The hard lesson is learning that you have to choose to accept it and make the decision not to let it suffer.

My 16-year-old considered his rat one of his best friends. They spent much of each day together in his room, the rat often sitting on his lap while my son worked at the computer, or on his chest while my son lay in bed reading. He had the creature for nearly four years and you can imagine how attached he was to it. By the time we took the rat to the vet, it was a forgone conclusion that it wasn’t coming home again; it was in bad shape. My son understood that his rat was only suffering unduly and finally convinced himself that it was the right thing to do, but he was so distraught, he couldn’t bring himself to accompany me to the vet or to participate in the burial; he just wanted to cling to the happy memories, instead. I don’t blame him a bit.

When my 14-year-old found out that his rat was ill, and the vet wanted over $400 to run all the tests and see if it was “just a cyst” instead of a tumor, there was no acceptable way to explain to him that we simply didn’t have that kind of extra cash lying around. He offered to sell his trumpet (which he isn’t playing anymore and which probably needs to be sold, anyway) to cover the costs. What do you say to that? He didn’t yet understand that the vet was just offering to cover all the bases out of a sense of duty, but that you the client have to read between the lines to understand what’s really going on.

In the end, both children came to grips with the reality that their rats were incurable, and they certainly didn’t want the animals to continue to suffer, but it didn’t make it any less painful for either to actually make the decision to give up hope and let the vet kill his beloved pet. It was as if they were killing the animals themselves. As an adult, we understand the truths of tight family budgets, mass inbreeding of rats, and the desire not to see animals (or humans) suffer. We get it, and though we don’t like to make those hard choices, we do make them. But the hardest life-lesson a child experiences regarding pets is the first time he or she has to serve on that creature’s death panel.