First, let me preface this by saying that I am unabashedly an animal lover. Some of the lowest moments in my life have been saying goodbye to a cherished animal companion, and I understand the bond that people can form with an animal.
That said, I wish I knew what the fuck was going on in my roommate’s head. She’s generally a pretty nice person, if a bit loopy and misguided. But I’m afraid that she’s gone completely off the deep end this time.
See, she’s got this hamster, “Sart”. [tangent] (Only recently did I find out its name is actually Sartre, and she’s just been mispronouncing it for the last three years. 
But anyway.) [/tangent] Sart has by all accounts lived a long, full, and healthy life of the sort that hamsters live; his days have been spent in a carefree mixture of sleeping, loading his jowls up with food, and banging into the furniture in his plastic ball. And the time, it seems, has come for that life to draw to its’ natural conclusion.
Only my roommate won’t let it happen.
A few weeks ago, Sart seemed to be taking ill; he was even less energetic than usual, and was mostly uninterested in things like eating and moving about. He also appeared to be losing his fur. Now, a normal person at this point would consign themselves to the inevitable, that their pet has lived its natural life and is slowly moving to the great beyond, and take steps to make that process involve as little suffering as possible for the animal.
But clearly, my roommate is not a normal person. Instead of doing the above, she whisked him off to a vet and spent $100 to have him looked at. (This is the same person who regularly has to “wait till I’m paid” to pay her share of the bills.) The vet prescribed some sort of medication for the fur loss and tactfully tried to suggest that maybe Sart’s time was due, advice that fell on deaf ears. (I know, I read the diagnosis sheet.) The roomie dutifully applied the cream that the vet gave her, and haughtily rebuffed any suggestion by myself and the other roommate that perhaps Sart’s time was up.
And when, to no one’s surprise but her own, the hamster’s condition failed to improve, she called the vet AGAIN in an attempt to prolong his clear suffering and misery. And so now, per the vet’s very reluctant advice, she is giving the hamster subcutaneous injections of Benadryl in an effort to keep him alive, despite the fact that Sart has now been reduced to a largely hairless bundle of quivering, miserable pink that once a day or so ventures forth for a few nuggets of food. And meanwhile she’s discussing taking him in to the vet a second time.
And so, because I don’t have the heart to say it to her face, I’ll say it here. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?
Let your damn hamster end its life peacefully instead of mercilessly dragging it out for days and weeks just to feed your own sense of sick, misguided affection and gratification. I’m not even sure why you liked the thing in the first place; after all, it occasionally likes to repay your affection by biting, HARD. Or have you already forgotten the time a couple months ago when Sart abruptly dug into your thumb so forcefully that drops of your blood sprayed onto the carpet? You stupid, self-centered bitch cow. Does the fact that your pet is clearly suffering and in pain mean nothing to you?
But then, I guess I shouldn’t expect too much from her. After all, she once told me that growing up, her family had a dog that lived to be 19…largely because instead of putting it to sleep, they spent $$$ at the vet so it could life the last six months of its life blind and paralyzed while they carried it to the food dish so it could eat and the backyard to so it could let go of waste.