If talking about my current dog. Rehoming. Never. I would live on the street before I would get rid of her.
Put to sleep. If she suffering and had no quality of life.

Another dog I could not say as you don't know what you are prepared to put up with until it happens.

Love is blind.

I don`t really get what you`re saying, Moonsmum. Are you asking at what point we should admit that we can`t cope? Or are you asking at what point the dog should be pts? These are two different things IMO.
I have had/ met dogs I couldn`t manage, as have most people I should imagine. But that doesn`t mean the dogs were beyond all hope. It means I wasn`t the right person for them.
I have met dogs who, IMO, had little quality of life and would have been pts if the decision had been mine.
I think you have be pragmatic about these situations - which are not uncommon, unfortunately.
I won`t comment on hypothetical situations because none of us know our limits till we reach them.

'Best for the dog' is a bit simplistic for me. I would say 'best for the dog' for PTS if the dog's quality of life had become so poor it was obviously unhappy and distressed all the time, and it could not enjoy the life it loved and was used to. Or, definitely, if it was in a lot of pain.

I've rehomed a dog twice in my life. The first was a very quick turnaround rehoming - back to Battersea. A gorgeous supersized 'little hobo' dog who loved everyone apart from my youngest son who had just started walking. Adored my 3yr old and all the kids in the street.

Problem came to light when my toddler approached it as it was lying on a sofa bed we had in the kitchen. It immediately turned nasty - even before my boy had reached it. It was snarling and growling and it was all I could do to drag it out the back and shut it out there until I could get someone to help me. It was like trying to budge an elephant that had glued itself down!

I took it back to Battersea with a heavy heart - sure they would put it to sleep. But they told me they would not, that they would just try to find a family who had no small children and didn't have them visit or living near them. They said it could well be the case that it had been brought to them in the first place because it was jealous of a new baby in the family?

The second time was a dog I'd agreed to take from a pal who could no longer care for it. An older dog, quite timid but really friendly who immediately fell in love with my (now ex) husband. He never walked it or fussed it but it was devoted to him!

We broke up during that year and that dog almost pined away. It would sit by my front gate just peering out waiting for him to come. It wore the fur off either side of it's nose where it had it up against the wire on the gate so much. It was heartbreaking to see and I could hardly get it to come in or eat or anything. I had two small children who were also upset at the time (but not as upset as the dog!) and was at my wits' end and it was hard for any of us to cheer up.

Lifelong friends of mine agreed to take it. It immediately bonded with the husband there too! He kept that dog until it died of old age. It lived to be very old. He trained it and whenever I visited them it would be under his chair or by his side. He took it to the pub in the evenings if he went out and even took it down to the betting shop with him when he went to place his bets!

I've had one dog PTS. My last GSD. She was 11 and very ill and then developed a tumour on one of her breasts. It was heartbreaking when the vet told me it would be best to leave her there and let her go. I couldn't. I hoped against hope there would be something they could do. I took her home but came to my senses the next day after we'd all sat up crying our eyeballs out with her that night.

I hope I never have to make that decision again. But would if it was best for the dog.

Well, I would have to say a dog that spontaneously attacked household members without reason (however, I think there are generally reasons for it - body language we've missed, health problems, dog having been stressed out and over its normal threshold, etc.) probably wasn't necessarily that happy, so even that could come under "whatever was best for the dog".

My last GSD was a bit of a nightmare to own at times and she was a chore rather than a pleasure at several points in her life. I loved her dearly but many a time I just had to stop on a walk and literally scream my annoyance out and return home. Slightly different situation in that half her issues were health related, but she just didn't have a sound temperament either.
She didn't display true or random aggression though - just understandable snaps from pain towards the end, and these were avoided by reading her body language, the pain controlled with meds, etc. Had she been a bit less predictable then perhaps we would have made the PTS call sooner.
We did actually get to the point where we felt it best to rehome her to someone with more experience, got as far as contacting a local rescue, but a volunteer offered to help us through our issues so we decided to give it one last try with proper help. Sadly her health took a turn for the worse not long after so the choice was taken out of our hands.

I think it's difficult to draw a strict line on when to rehome/PTS because it varies from dog to dog, home to home. We didn't have young kids who could have accidentally landed on/grabbed Prue by her hips and ended up bitten for it. We lived rurally enough to provide her with exercise suitable for her hips and her behavioural issues (for the most part). We didn't have another dog to worry about, everyone in the house knew her quirks and were prepared to work around them, etc. It may only have taken one factor in all of that to change the situation and make it unsuitable for everyone, dog included, so it's not really a black and white decision.

But my post wasn't only about put to sleep It was about rehome too, and I used the hypothetical situation, I didn't even mention PTS I wasn't asking if anyone would pts in those circumstance...

I certainly don't think a dog should be put to sleep just because a person can't cope

All I was saying was that I imagine there are probably situations that we can all get into where the dog might be blissfully happy in the home, but for one reason or another it is making the owner very unhappy. Would you continue to be unhappy because the dog was happy? You sound like an experienced owner who can put up with more than the average Joe, I was simply wondering if you would consider your own feelings too when making these decisions.

These decisions should always be taken with the dogs best interest in mind, but if people only ever considered the dogs happiness, no matter what it might be doing to them then there might be some very ill owners out there!

I certainly wasn't suggesting that a dog should be put to sleep if the owner can't cope, I'm not sure where I gave that impression


Maybe I'm not explaining myself well...

That's sort of the point I was making. Just that while it would be wonderful if the choice to rehome etc was purely down to what was best for the dog, then there would be far less dogs in rescues!!! But realistically, at least for most people, I think that other factors will come into play.

I have friends who have a 12 (not quite) yr old bull mastiff, the circumstances of how they got him are another story, but the situation is , he is now become unpredictable, , they had have dogs before (staffies) and have two children and always have a house full of other kids, its the way they live, the dog cant be trusted around any of the children's friends, or with some people, he is showing increasingly more aggression, and they are worried to death, they love the dog, have had a behaviourist in, but are on edge all the time.

The solution she is left with, but finds heartbreaking is to have him PTS, she will not re home him and pass on his problem and I applaud then for that.


i would only eve rehome a dog is I was physically incapable of looking after it, and only if said dog had no issues, if it did I would have it PTS.

As others many others have said, I would rehome a dog if it was in best interests of that dog.

As for putting a dog to sleep, I think there are worse things that can happen to a dog than having it PTS. Personally if I had a dog was unpredictably aggressive (and had caused damage) or had too many aggression related behavioural issues that made day-to-day management of that dog extremely difficult, I would consider putting to sleep. I don't think I could live with a dog that I was constantly on edge about as that kind of takes the fun out of pet ownership.

I've got a dog that has snapped on numerous occasions, and who has been so nervous and shut down in the past that we did question whether it was much of a life for her to be scared of her own shadow and get no joy out of anything (she was so far gone she would lie in her own mess rather than get out of her crate and wouldn't eat food we'd touched).

That bit got better, and with management now she lives a fairly good quality of life and we enjoy having her around. There are times when I feel despondent when we go back to her reacting to things or she takes a lunge at me for a minor transgression on my part.

We have discussed in the past whether we could cope with her but we felt that if we couldn't, the 'perfect theoretical home' was unlikely to come forward.

We are 2 adults, we had no kids and no other pets when we first had her so we've done our best. Getting our second (normal) dog highlighted just how much stress the first one caused - it took me months to not be on the edge of my seat waiting for him to bite or lunge when people approached as that was what I was used to!

For us, we manage our nervous/snappy dog very well at the moment and she is not big and powerful enough to do much damage anyway.

We had always agreed that if her quality of life dropped to a level below which we felt the bad days significantly outnumbered the good, or if people were in danger of being hurt by her, we would make the decision to let her go to sleep. Fortunately we have been lucky and she has improved beyond our hopes.

There are worse things than being PTS in the arms of someone that loves them, but for me to make my peace with it I would have to know I tried all I could to help - that would include seeking medical, behavioural and other help and trying all avenues first.

We discussed rehoming her at one point but I felt that as her problems weren't really caused by us, rather a general fear of life and everything in it, it would do her no good so we have perservered.

I love her dearly and she is 90% of the time a happy dog now and I am very proud of her. She has learned to give more warning before she reacts and I feel I can read her well now, I don't consider her a 'danger' to anyone as we manage her with gates in our house etc to keep her away from people that might not understand her. She occasionally nips me but it never leaves a mark and is outweighed by how loving towards me she is the rest of the time, she never means to hurt me she just panics.

She definitely took all the joy out of dog ownership for a long time though and many people thought we were insane to keep trying, but we put nobody else in the firing line doing so. If she was a stronger dog or if we had vulnerable people around things may have been different.

My second dog has shown us the joy of dog ownership again, and he's also improved the behaviour of the first one no end.

I think it's a very difficult question - because I've been thinking a lot how to answer it, and I haven't been able to yet!

Certainly some of what others have said rings true, but in regards to one's own dog - I think, I think that perhaps what one can cope with depends (there's that word again ) partly on how close or not you are to that dog. For example I could not imagine parting with my soul dog no matter what the problem, because I think I would have just lived through the years with her until it was her time to go to the Bridge.

If she were suffering mentally or physically it would be different of course. So yes, tough question!

I think also problems with neighbours can be a toughie. It can bring one to breaking point if one's neighbours hate one's dogs. I've had that and my solution was to move away from the bleepers to a nicer neighbourhood. Not everyone has that solution and in some cases I can see how the stress might make one say "rehoming is better than this".

Just a few tangled thoughts

Wys
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