I am sitting on a driveway with four other couples socially distancing and wearing a mask. Everyone is sipping wine or drinking beer. To be honest, the mask-wearing to not-mask-wearing ratio is not ideal.
The women are sitting on one side of the circle and the men are on the other. The women are talking politics and Dr. Fauci; while the men are talking football, their college’s record, and whether the SEC is still the best conference.
It was a quiet night until one of the women asked a question directed at me. She wanted to know if I knew that the last six dogs that died on our street all died of cancer and whether I should look into whether there was a cancer cell.
Let’s break down the statistics. The last six dogs that died over the past two years had an average age of 14. There were two Labrador retrievers, two golden retrievers (mine), one poodle who was 17, and a mixed breed.
The street is a fairly new street. Most of us have lived here less than three years. The electrical lines are underground and we have all had recent
Radon testing. If there is one thing about where I live, especially with the vast majority of us having empty nests and a little more disposable income, the dogs in our lives are very well taken care of and I am confident that they all moved to our neighborhood with relatively clean bills of health.
The average life expectancy for small dogs is 15-16 years, medium and large dogs 10-14 years and giant breeds around 7 to 8 years. I have been very lucky and I do EVERYTHING for my dogs and I have not had one live beyond 14. I like big dogs.
In my adult life, I have had five dogs and, other than a Keeshond who was hit by a car when I was a kid, every one of my dogs died of cancer. Let me make myself very clear, my dogs lived long enough to get cancer. They didn’t suffer from heart disease or infectious diseases but lived long enough to get cancer.
So, I answered the question with a question. In the past five years I asked everyone to think about the reasons why you’ve attended funerals. What was the cause of death?
The top three responses were cancer, heart disease, and COVID-19. I told them that those numbers probably reflect the national average. Dogs have a life expectancy for a reason, as do humans.
At some point in our aging process cancer, heart disease, and kidney disease become clinically relevant. The biggest decision, and the most humane decision we make as compassionate pet parents is that we don’t have to make our pets suffer and we advocate for them. I had to put my own golden retriever Kelly to sleep last week. She was 12. All of my dogs have lived to 14, but it was not in Kelly’s cards.
She got the dreaded metastatic Hemangiosarcoma of the spleen that is just devastating to golden retrievers. Kelly never gave me one second of grief. he was sweet until the end, and my job was to not let her have one second of discomfort.
The woman in the circle just nodded her head agreeing that there was no cancer cell in our neighborhood. My wife sighed because hopefully the discussion was over before it got heated.