He couldn’t take care of himself anymore. For the year and a half since the doctors had diagnosed his hard-core diabetes, family members had been giving him insulin shots every day. The living room had come to look like a hospital ward, with his IV bag hanging over his head and his bed covered with disposable linens in case he lost control of his urine while sleeping. Two days before, he’d had his third and worst comalike episode, slipping away but never quite making it over the edge before coming back to a life that wasn’t really life anymore. He didn’t recognize anybody around him, couldn’t get out of bed or feed himself. To say nothing of chasing birds.
Which is how Shanan, who runs both Allen and Chicago Home Veterinary Care, ended up driving from his house on the north side to Naperville at 10:30 one night. At almost midnight Shanan used a two-injection procedure that first sedated the cat–and allowed Corso and his wife, Michele, a few minutes to deal with the prospect of finally giving up Tweety–and then stopped his heart painlessly. Tweety died surrounded by the people, smells, and toys he had known best, and the Corsos got to cry and moan and generally handle the death the way any big loss ought to be handled: sloppily and unself-consciously.
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“It was the best way for a cat to go, I’m sure, and for me it was more comfortable,” Corso says. “It gave me the opportunity to express my emotions without the stifling feeling of being in public. I’m not an extroverted, overly emotional person who would show my emotions in public, but I felt really sad and tearful. I was able to spend that time with myself and with my wife.”
He’s not against veterinarians–he’s one of them, after all–but Shanan thinks veterinary medicine as it’s practiced today makes sensitivity to a client’s grief a too-costly distraction. Shanan recalls only one lecture on grief from his entire veterinary education at Michigan State University in the early 80s. “I’m sure those veterinarians who went to school in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s got even less than that,” he says. “It’s the atmosphere that was established early in the century, when animals were primarily fulfilling utilitarian functions–draft horses and livestock. It just wasn’t part of the formal material to worry about people’s feelings.” Shanan believes that many veterinarians make time for compassion even though it’s a little like throwing bits of their income out the window. Even so his clients and others say the office setting is still stressful for the animal and the person.
When her regular vet wasn’t in, she started thumbing through the phone book and found Shanan’s ad. A short time later Shanan injected Barney with a sedative and then a lethal, concentrated overdose of an anesthetic. “Dr. Shanan said, ‘He’s gone,’ and I said, ‘How do you know?’ He said there was no heartbeat, so I stood up and the cat was limp. That was it. Dr. Shanan stayed with me until the pet cemetery came to get the body. He had tears in his eyes, but he had never met me or my cat before that day.”
Shanan’s main interest is the human-animal bond. He follows the research of a California psychologist who studies the role of pets in child development. She has found that pets provide kids with the same unconditional love that grandparents can offer and are as entertaining and fun to be with as siblings. “At the same time they don’t have the negative sides with their pets,” he says. “No sibling rivalry, and grandparents can be very set in their ways, limiting the relationship. So having a pet is almost like combining the best of a sibling and a grandparent.”
“A lot of us who see pets being euthanized when their lives are over see the benefit of euthanasia,” says the Anti-Cruelty Society’s Stern. “Many of us here feel that we are lucky that we can do this for these animals, and we wish people had the same opportunity to decide.”
