When it was time for my dog to go to the Great Beyond the vet gave her an OD of barbituates to knock her out and followed that up with the coup de grace out of my sight. Hearing about lethal injections of prisoners reports say that the follow-up that stops the heart can cause physical distress and apparent conscious pain. Did that happen to my sweet, little Cocker Spaniel, too?
Assuming the dog cocktail is similar to the human cocktail, your pooch was somewhere in the Astral Plane well before getting the heart-stopper. Sodium thiopental, the first element in the human LI series, is an extremely potent CNS depressant. It stops the victim from breathing, but the “stop breathing” dose is several times greater than the “go totally unconscious dose,” so I would imagine there’s no suffering involved.
~1cS, who has never been euthanized, but knows a thing or two about barbiturates.
Yeah, those reports of criminals reacting seemed overblown to me. I’ve been anesthetized several times and didn’t notice anything until it wore off and I would assume that getting opened up and poked around in would be at least as traumatic as having my heart and breathing stopped.
Maybe the executioner didn’t factor in body weight, adrenaline level, and prior drug use experience enough before he added a 200% cushion to the dose. Could it be that our prison system sometimes gets an attack of the cheaps when spending a bit more would be more effective?
No.
Unlike with your experience, our very kindly vet came to our house and put our Eskie to sleep in the comfortable and familiar environment of our living room after a long day of sitting on the couch and snuggling. I cannot express to you how truly accurate the expression “put to sleep” is: he very quietly just left us. I can assure you that your Cocker went out without any suffering whatsoever and is playing with my Eskie in a much better place.
Did your Eskie like to fight? Not mean fight, but play fight? Because Lady LOVED to fight.
Thanks, folks. As for guys who get the needle, I don’t feel bad if it hurts a bit, considering why they’re there.
He went through a really playful period between puppyhood and 4 or 5 years old that he really enjoyed playing tug-of-war, but he was never much for the scruffle on the floor, playing go-for-the-kill type fighting I think you mean. He might have been different if he’d had a baby brother or sister to play with, because the new pups only have two modes: asleep and tearing each other to pieces.
If you have more than one dog you find that behavior lasts long beyond puppyhood.
As an aside, saw a show the other night in which male baboons were kidnapping weaned feral puppies and raising them as part of the family/troop, down to petting and grooming them. The grown dogs scare off the feral dogs. Can you imagine anything wanting a yappy dog around to warn them of intruders?
(What is it, Lassie? Did Timmy fall in the well or is it just that the mailman was here? Oh, I see: some kids walked past the house. Useless damned dog.)