Jr and fido got tangled up, jr landing on top of fido. Fido retaliated, getting jr above and below the eye. Another time, it was on the middle finger. It’s time for us to make a choice.
Fido was born on 17Dec94 (he was 7½ weeks old when we got him in early Feb95). We watched him grow from a little puppy through all the stages a dog’s life has. We moved house four times, and we had two cats and five birds in that time, but fido was always our first-born fur-baby.
Our IVF journey started about 1999, and bore fruit on 21Jul10 when jr came to us as our first-born. Fido and puss were not impressed, and made the usual signs to show this. But as jr grew, that lack of being impressed grew too. Then jr started walking, and fido and puss hated it. Puss can at least escape, but when escape is not possible, he withstands the pats, both gentle and otherwise, for just so long. There was one time when he was considering lashing out, but didn’t.
Fido isn’t as tolerant. He has arthritis, is deaf, and going blind. He doesn’t always know what’s going on, so when a 10kg toddler fell on him, he retaliated the only way he knew how. So yesterday we went to the vets to discuss our options, knowing that we didn’t have too many. We decided to take the lethal option, but to come back today to get the deed done.
The vet was very understanding, and took him out the back to put a catheter in his arm for the injection. But she seemed to be taking such a long time. When she emerged with fido she said that most of the delay was in trying to contact her partner, who was not answering. She offered to take fido from us on a trial basis – they had lost their second dog a couple of months ago and, while fido would not be a replacement, he would certainly fill the void.
I leapt at the opportunity, although mrs_g was not as willing to take it up. She thought we were both crazy. Fido has a number of ailments which do not contribute to his quality of life, but my idea was that this is a vet with access to fido’s medical records, so she knew what she was signing up for. We left the vets without a dog today, but not the way we imagined we would be doing so!
Fido is very well loved both at our place and at the vets’ – he’d been going there all his life and the staff there would have been devastated if we had taken the lethal option. Let’s all hope that he gets on well with this other dog, that the vet’s partner doesn’t mind adopting an older dog (this vet has been with the practice for 6yr and had never done anything like this), and that the trial goes well. Fido is a beautiful little dog who doesn’t deserve to go out the way we’d planned.
* I have spelled fido, puss, and jr with lower-case initials because they’re not their real names, making them regular (not proper) nouns.
