You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know, Until You Do - A Hippo Essay

By Sue Alexander

June 1, 2020

This week has been crazy busy on Losing Lulu. So many people are grieving and on top of that everyone in the world is impacted in one way or another by the Quarantine. Either you are going in, or you are in or you are coming out and no matter where you are in the cycle, you are likely uncertain about what is happening and how stressed everyone around you is. In various places around the world, we are seeing civil unrest, and that is hard to cope with too. This means that not everyone has enough spoons to carefully consider their responses. This means that the modmin or moderation/administration team has had to be extra vigilant on Losing Lulu. We are working really hard to keep things safe for everyone, and to help people to understand why we work the way we do here on Losing Lulu, so I am going to ask everyone to please, go back and reread all the hippo essays (you can even find out why we call these “hippo” essays and it has nothing to do with pit bulls!)

I don’t write as many hippo essays as I used to write; mostly we have not needed to do so. But once in a while, like now, an issue comes up that is a hot button issue for a number of people and we need another hippo essay. Today’s issue is euthanizing young animals. This has created a great deal of tension on the list, and I want to help people better understand the issue and what can happen when we are intolerant of other people’s situation.

Let’s start with the example that began the tempest on list. One of our members, very sadly, had to evaluate a litter of 12-week-old puppies. The puppies were behaviourally abnormal, and in rescue. When she evaluated them, she determined that the puppies would be very unlikely to be successful as pets. They were also not going to be suitable for working homes. Now, being a professional means examining all the alternatives and when necessary, getting a second opinion, so this member reached out to a board-certified veterinary behaviourist and consulted on what she was seeing. The veterinary behaviourist agreed with her that this litter was behaviourally very abnormal and between the two of them decided that the most humane alternative was to euthanize the entire litter.

I am going to switch tacks here, because I want everyone to understand something. When you see a litter like this, you are facing physically beautiful animals. You are facing “cute” in the extreme. And no one, not one of us, got into the profession of behaviour consulting without at least once falling head over heels in love with an animal. None of us. We all love our subjects. We all love the species we work with. And we HATE, hate, hate it when they are ill. We hate seeing abnormal behaviour. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says “hey…let’s euthanize a litter of puppies”. But when we face a young animal who is behaviourally abnormal, we also face another reality. That reality involves a profound understanding of the suffering that the animal is going through, and that the animal WILL continue to go through. We face suffering in our subjects every day of our careers. And we know that the animals in front of us are suffering and are going to continue to suffer. That eats at us. For some of us, that drives us out of the profession. I know many, very talented trainers who have left the profession because they could not take even one more animal going through their hands while suffering. I want to add that when I see people continuing to promote the idea that every animal can be fixed, I personally feel like they must just not see the suffering that I can see, because to think that they think it is okay for these animals to continue to suffer would mean that they are psychopathic. These people often are kind, thoughtful and compassionate in other ways, but completely blind to the suffering that I can see.

So where does this leave us? This means that when we face an animal such as this, we need to carefully consider the outcome. It doesn’t matter if we are talking about a puppy, or a kitten, or a foal, or an adult animal. When they are behaviourally abnormal enough that they are suffering, we can consider if there is a home where they might be able to cope, or if there is medication that will allow them to cope, or if they should be euthanized. And when we are talking about a young animal, we often face the question, especially from those outside of the realm of animal behaviour professionals, of considering if that animal in question will grow out of the behaviour problem, or if they can be treated. We often hear “just give him a chance”. And this is where it gets very, very difficult.

When we are talking about a physical ailment, we can often point to an empirical diagnostic tool and say “the bone is broken” or “the bloodwork shows an abnormality”. With behaviour, we are looking at a moving target and we are dealing with matrices that may not be familiar to our clients or even to our colleagues in similar fields. So when I see a puppy (I am going to speak here about dogs, not because this is confined to dogs, but because that is my species of expertise) who is chasing his tail, I am seeing something completely different than what a veterinary technician might see. I am asking myself things like “is this persistent” and “does this happen in response to a conflict” and “how often does this happen”, while the vet tech may be sitting right beside me and saying “puppies are so funny” and “I know many puppies who have done this when young but who have grown out of this”. And the conclusions we each make will be very different. Yes, there are some puppies who grow out of this behaviour, but there are also many, many puppies who engage in spinning to such excess that they cannot eat, or sleep, or grow properly. We see the same behaviour, but we see it differently.

The list of behaviours I see differently is long. I see repetitive behaviours, aggression, and anxiety that many of my veterinary colleagues don’t register as at all relevant. I see play very differently than many people in other branches of animal health might. I am also able to evaluate when learning is not happening in a timely manner. And add to that the fact the many dogs who don’t develop on schedule. Just like humans learn to speak, read and socialize in a specific “normal” order, and if they don’t, they will likely need support to develop to their fullest potential, when puppies don’t develop according the schedule they should, we know that these puppies are going to have trouble later on. They will suffer. We look at things like the puppies who don’t play normally with their littermates. The pups who don’t attach to humans, or even who don’t have the opportunity to attach to humans during a specific time frame, will struggle later on with specific known issues. When they don’t learn about their environments, or when they resist even gentle handling at specific ages, they are going to have trouble. We have hard science on these facts and this is a large part of the academic background it takes to be a behaviour consultant.

I sometimes think about my dentist when I am evaluating a dog. Do you have any idea what your dentist is looking at when he pokes about in your mouth? I mean beyond the generic “he is looking to ensure my teeth are healthy”; do you have any idea what he is doing when he pokes around and used a probe and calls out numbers to his assistant? I have NO clue! But when I hired my dentist, I never said “are you sure that there will be a problem when you tell me there will be a problem?” I often think of my dentist (Yaaay, Dr. Raco…thank goodness YOU know what you are doing, because I sure don’t!) when my clients or the general public challenges my professional opinion. I often wonder what they say to their dentist when he says to them “you need a crown” or “the lingual surface of your upper premolars is showing some significant degradation”. This issue is particularly problematic when I speak with people in the rescue community, who may have significant experience handling dogs, and little formal education in animal behaviour. The same is sometimes true of professional dog handlers, and breeders too, and it is always frustrating. When I am asked, “how do you know?” I want to explain in detail, why I know, but that is going to take me two to four years; the equivalent of how long it takes to gain the academic background to do my job. The answer is just too complex to answer in a short period of time.

So let’s come back to the issue that prompted me to write today. The issue is that many people who don’t have the education and background that a professional behaviour consultant or very experienced trainer, or veterinary behaviourist has, want to second guess the person who had to make the choice to euthanize a litter. And they were very hurtful in their criticism. They went on to recruit an ally to dump on the original poster. And when we removed them, that person went onto the net and publicly criticized the original poster’s business!

Being a behaviour consultant is emotional hard work. I love my client’s dogs, even the ones I have never, and will never touch. I love my clients too! When the dog I work with is young, the feeling is often “can’t we give him a chance”? Sometimes we can. Sometimes, with a lot of work, it works out. Mostly though, when I see a dog who is suffering enough that I open the discussion with the client about euthanasia, I am already very certain that this dog is suffering now, and is going to continue to suffer. I am already very certain that this dog will cause harm to someone or to another animal. And when I discuss this with the client, having a supportive community who understands that this would not be the desired outcome is essential to my ability to continue to do the work that I do. This is why, when a tragedy such as having to euthanize a complete litter happens, on Losing Lulu we do not second guess. The original poster is hurting, and no amount of “what if”, “why”, or “did you think of” is going to change what happened.

I was asked to write something about why we might choose to euthanize a young animal to try and help everyone to better understand what happened in the case that brought us to the realization that members of our community who are not behaviour professionals may not understand why we would not “give a puppy a chance”. Trish and I have spoken at length about this topic. If you remember her dog Chinook, her first Lulu, he was growling and glaring at people virtually as soon as he could open his eyes, and by the time she euthanized him, at 18 months, not only had he inflicted many bites on Trish and her boyfriend, he was suffering terribly. Euthanizing him freed him of his demons, and at the end of the day, had he died as a puppy, he would not have suffered for 18 months. Trish and her boyfriend would not have been injured. Their community would have been safer. And when you read the history, you can see that the writing was on the wall. Growling and glaring alone, at 3 weeks of age, should not be a death sentence, but if you read the whole story, from his prenatal malnutrition, through the raising of his litter to the development of his behaviour problems, there was a predictable and dangerous arc to his story. Behaviour professionals all have files full of cases like these, and we have spent the years of learning necessary to understand why it is that these puppies are not going to be rehabbed if we “give them a chance”. At best they will suffer, and at worst they will suffer and inflict suffering on the people who love them, on the other animals in the home, on their community and sometimes on the very professionals who are trying to help them.

Let me re-emphasize; we will keep Losing Lulu as safe as possible. Everyone touched by having to euthanize an animal, any animal for behaviour, is suffering. The two-day period that I had 7 euthanasia discussions in a row at work nearly did me in. When behaviour professionals and shelter and rescue workers have to face euthanizing young animals, we suffer. We suffer because we care, profoundly and deeply. Having Losing Lulu helps us to cope. We need you, and we need one another, and we need to know that we will not face blaming or second guessing, especially when the grief is so fresh.

If you have not already, read the rules and read the hippo essays. We have a culture here and we WILL enforce the rules in order to keep the culture safe. At our core is the value of #keepitkind. This includes no blaming, shaming or naming. Please keep in mind that also means no calling out. That is not productive either. If you see anyone breaking a rule, the thing to do is to report the comment. This alerts the entire modmin team and that allows us to quickly address the issue. We remove all comments that are not productive. We enforce the rules very strictly. We are not a democracy, and we are not going to change the rules just because there is a faction who doesn’t like them. We have a safe and beautiful culture here in part because we worked out a set of rules to support the culture we have offered to everyone. If the culture is not your cup of tea, that is okay; you don’t have to stay. But if this culture IS something you value, please help us out. Keep it kind. Report comments that may break the rules. Read the hippo essays. Know the rules and follow them. And comment on as many posts as you can to help spread the work of supporting one another.

As a final note I want to thank you all for being here. This has been a difficult essay to write. We are over 6 000 members now, and there are about 15 of us managing the list. We are dealing with a very difficult subject; one that when I began my career as a behaviour consultant was a “dirty secret”. We have brought light and love to this topic and we are seeing a sea change in how we approach this. We now see professionals talking about this at conferences, and in public. This is good. I am not ashamed of having released my Lulus; Thurber (canine), Newton (canine) and Kayak (equine). They each were special to me and helped me to become who I am today, and although they each caused harm and grief, I loved them and I am grateful to have a community to share them with. Thank you for helping to build, support and maintain something precious.

Today's image is of a friend who portaged my canoe 850m so that I could take my trip last year. I needed this help because with my head injury I was unable to portage. We all need help sometimes and last year, this help allowed me to do my 200km trip. This year, I have to get fit enough to do my own portages, because I have healed enough now that I can do it. We all heal and when we do, we have to do our own heavy lifting. In the meantime, we all have to help one another.