I heard about a friend of a friend who summers in the Hamptons or some other ritzy place. Supposedly this person gets a new dog every summer and then has the dog euthanized at the end of the summer.
Is this an urban legend? I really don’t want to believe that a pet owner could be so callous.
I don’t really know how you expect anyone on this board to know the personal dog-murdering habits of some random guy with a place in the Hamptons, but it seems pretty unlikely.
The OP asks “Is this an urban legend.” That’s a factual question. Of course it is possible both that it is an urban legend, and that in this particular case, it’s actually a true story rather than a retelling of the legend. But generally, once one discovers a story they have been told matches an urban legend, this is a fair enough reason to discount the story without further evidence.
-FrL-
I doubt you can walk into a vet with a healthy dog and just ask for it to be euthanized for no reason, presumably if you were sick of it they’d take it off your hands and send it to the pound.
Of course the person could just take it out and shoot it, but then moral considerations aside, it seems like it would be just as easy to drive it to the pound as it would to drive it out into the woods to kill it.
Anyways, for what its worth, I couldn’t find the story by searching Snopes, but I suspect that its fictional.
Well, I guess stupid dogs last all summer long.
snerk 
One of our veterenarian Dopers has mentioned this type of thing before; i.e. people bringing him pets to euthanize because the pet has become ‘inconvenient’. I can’t remember who, though!
That’s bad enough. But what’s really sickening about this story is that the person is buying a pet dog, knowing full well that he intends to put the dog down.
I agree that it’s hard to verify the habits of “some dude in the Hamptons,” but that’s a problem with a lot of urban legends.
Look at it this way: if at the beginning of each summer, the man adopted a dog slated for execution that day, took it home, gave it a great summer full of fun and excitement and affection, and then took it back to the fate he rescued it from–it’s hard to see that as an evil act. It would have been nice if he’d been willing to accept more responsibility, but since I haven’t given any pets at all even a moment of extra life, I am not sure I can say much.
Healthy animals are being put down by the thousands every week.
Nothing on Snopes, FWIW.
Why I usually agree with pragmatic approaches to things, someone else may have (or may not have) otherwise adopted the dog.
Also, the OP (in their second post) says the person bought the dog, not adopted, suggesting to me they weren’t picking up some mutt from the pound to give it another few months to live, but were buying a presumably desirable dog that would’ve gone to another owner had they not bought it.
Again, it certainly sounds like an Urban Legend, meant to illustrate the wastefulness and immorality of those heartless Scrooge McDuck types up at the Hamptons.
Do they still euthanize teen pop idols each year like they used to back in the Bay City Rollers days?.
It happens all the time. NajaPop DVM, unfortunately, gets this fairly frequently. As a result, one of the nice perks of being a vet’s kid is that you’ll never complain about not having any pets. We had a herd of cats and about a dozen dogs over the span of my childhood.
I do remember overhearing my dad talk about it once, how terrible it was for him to have someone demand that of him. 
Mrs Premise: Busy! I’ve just spent four hours burying the cat.
Mrs Conclusion: Four hours to bury a cat?
Mrs Premise: Yes! It wouldn’t keep still, wriggling about howling its head off.
Mrs Conclusion: Oh - it wasn’t dead then?
Mrs Premise: Well, no, no, but it’s not at all a well cat so as we were going away for a fortnight’s holiday, I thought I’d better bury it just to be on the safe side.
What’s so frustrating is that almost any city shelter will take the animal off your hands no questions asked.
Pullet
Has had way too many phone calls where people want advice on how to euthanize their pets at home themselves.
Why is that frustrating though? If the city shelter didn’t do that, then you’d have people killing their animals at home, or strays all over the place. Better to accept them in a shelter than do nothing.
It’s frustrating that the supposed dude in the story had the dog euthanized, when a shelter would likely have taken it.
Never mind. As posted by the previous poster.
FWIW, my mother is finding herself possibly facing this position. She has two cats, one 19 and the other 15. The 19 year-old defecates on the carpet in the living room, probably because it is not able to get down the stairs to the littler box. My mother has moved a litter biox upstairs but the cat still defecates on the living room. The 15 year-old is showing signs of diabetes, but there is no way my mother can treat the cat because it will not tolerate her being near him. My mother is in her 70s, recently widowed and dealing with her own health issues. She doesn’t want to put the cats down, but she’s also pragmatic enough to know that the likelihood of either of them being adopted out of a shelter is nil and heartbroken at the thought of taking them from a life where they’ve been pampered and loved for in one instance close to two decades to a life in a cage. I guess some people might, should my mom decide to put them down, as doing it for her convenience. If so I hope she can be forgiven.