One of the quandaries in medical ethics concerns the case of a young man who, taken to a hospital with burns over most of his body, was subsequently held there and treated for a considerable time against his wishes. Disfigured, blinded, and in unremitting pain, some of it caused by the treatment itself, he wished simply for someone to help him die.
Years later I heard him speak at the medical institution where he had been treated. Healed and no longer in pain, he was asked if he was not grateful now that his life had been preserved, his earlier expressed wishes overruled "for his own good," even if honoring them would have relieved his suffering. He replied that his present enjoyment of life did not override his past right to euthanasia--he had suffered horribly and made the considered decision, steadily maintained, that death was preferable. Disregarding that, the hospital had spent a bundle of money on medical and legal experts who successfully contested his preferences and his right to have them honored.
Compare this man's experience with the embrace of what is called euthanasia within animal welfare and animal control organizations. When the patient is a human, even euthanasia advocates hedge it around with a host of conditions and criteria. And they should--they recognize in this that the choice to end life is a weighty matter. Still, human euthanasia happens far more often than we know simply because the legal and ethical ambiguities discourage openness. When the "patient" is dog or cat, on the other hand, "euthanasia" is inflicted annually in the millions, in the open, with even a certain pride by the perpetrator who has the courage "to do the dirty work" that those animal shelters with a "limited access" mentality are said to lack.
So we see here a stark species difference in the readiness to end lives: extreme reluctance to end the palpable suffering of humans, but a notable moral comfort at ending the predicted suffering of millions of companion animals. The double standard deserves discussion, but at another time. The unintended consequences of animal welfarists killing these animals on behalf of cultural convenience, I discussed at length in Disposable Animals. The present concern has to do with understanding the "everydayness" of animal shelter killing, with how such a response (does anyone call it a solution?) to animal abandonment becomes routine.
To speak of "euthanasia" becoming routine does not deny the real pain of those who administer it. I have spent enough time in their presence listening to them to know that shelter workers who carry out this unfortunate business suffer deeply for it. The conviction that they are doing what is tragic but unavoidable affords psychological defense to a degree but never completely. They care genuinely for animals, they believe genuinely in the necessity of what they do, they genuinely hurt. Nonetheless, a newcomer to the shelter culture usually cannot help being impressed by the evidently comfortable self-assurance of those who have carried out the killing, adamantly defined as euthanasia, for any great length of time.
They are puzzled at others' blindness to necessity, offended at their objections. Emotional defenses, intellectualization, and rational analysis provide part of the comfort in the shelter milieu, but I have come to think that an unspoken compact between society and shelter provides the essential foundation. Composed of a fundamental mutuality, the compact enables each participant to make right what, from alternative perspectives, seems quite wrong.
Society and shelter rhetoric will contradict this assertion. Members of the public commonly deny that they could or would do the killing, they wonder how shelter workers do it, they sometimes even blame them for doing it (particularly when confronted with high adoption standards). Shelter staff similarly but even more strongly rebuke society for its irresponsibility, its unwillingness to make the necessary commitments, its abusive and neglectful treatment of animal companions. Both sides mean what they say.
I submit, however, that the compact supersedes (and perhaps encompasses) these words, for in deserting its companions at the shelter, society is granted relief for the guilt of dereliction--animal lovers, after all, have take on the responsibility of fending for these unfortunate creatures. Resignedly, they accept their role: they rescue and dispose (and perhaps enable) others' failure. Reciprocally, society legitimizes what it seems to make necessary, it provides contributions of both money and animal victims, its affirmations and failures provide the veil of necessity. In short, the compact binds shelter to society and prevents it from renouncing the terms, stepping out of the paradigm.
"Euthanasia" must become uncomfortable, deeply so. The moral value of our companions' lives, the moral weight of ending them for interests not their own, must become the basis for an altogether new compact, one which renounces rather than embraces this deadly disposition.
[Craig Brestrup is former Executive Director of the Progressive Animal Welfare Society in Washington, is current Executive Director of The Association of Sanctuaries, and holds a PHD in medical and environmental ethics. His book, Disposable Animals: Ending the Tragedy of Throwaway Pets, is available through bookstores or by calling 800-463-8181.]
