Helping You Decide
When Is It Time?
While advances in veterinary medicine are allowing your pet to live a longer, healthier life, the most difficult decision you can make regarding your best friend’s care is when to let them go. There’s rarely a clear-cut answer as to when is the “right” time to put your beloved dog down—rather, it’s a culmination of a variety of factors. While no one can make this difficult choice for you, there are a few things that can help. When faced with an older pet who is slowly declining, knowing the exact time to end their suffering is much more difficult. Use the aid of our quality-of-life scale to help determine how comfortable and happy your pet is on a daily basis.
Quality of Life
Assessing your pet’s quality of life is subjective and highly dependent on their disease process, their personality, and your personal beliefs. It is important to understand the disease process your pet is experiencing to properly evaluate their quality of life, making it important to have discussions with your veterinarian. No one knows your pet like you do, so we created these Quality-of-Life (QOL) Scales to help guide you in your decision-making process. The QOL scale is designed to walk you through a series of questions to help turn a subjective decision into more of a quantitative one. You can use the scale day by day and mark the score on a calendar so that you can look back after a couple days, weeks and see if your pet is having more good than bad days.
Quality-of-Life
End-of-Life
Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions that may arise as you assess the quality of your pet’s health. Our Care Coordinators are passionate about providing the information needed to help you walk through the scales and be a sounding board for your concerns judgement free.