An item in yesterday's news.... Someone in this area has identified a new market niche, and is taking advantage of it, inviting pet owners to consider the services she is offering. A more personalized euthanasia for one's pet in its declining years. This veterinarian will come to your home to perform the last rites of life-withdrawal from a family companion considered to be beyond its years of optimum health and activity.

In the service of which the human owners of the companion animal will not have to remove themselves from the comfort of their home, and the pet itself will be in familiar surroundings, with those whom it cares most deeply about present and accounted for. This is said to be the first such service of its kind offered in Canada although evidently it is available in some places in the United States.

The bells and whistles that one can choose to accompany the ritual of end-of-life decision-making can be approached with flowers and the lighting of candles and one's choice of musical background. This solemnizing and ritualization of the farewell is thought to be able to have a calming effect on the participants.

Testimonials in the article describe one person deciding the end must be nigh for the family pet because it could no longer fulfill the usual half-kilometre walk in the woods behind the home. Another claimed it was clear the pet had to be "given up" after a last walk, and the assembling of the family to witness the expiration of their pet.

Why should this be so? Our little female Pomeranian-Poodle is now into her twentieth year, and although she has lost most of her sight and hearing, she remains interested in life. She has forgotten many things, and we must be alert to her needs, but she has a robust appetite where in her prime she did not, and although she cannot walk as far as she used to, with careful guidance and patience she does fairly well.

Above all, from our long familiarity with her we know when she is expressing pleasure, and she does fairly often. We can see when she is comfortable and content, and this is often enough to assure us that she finds life more than tolerable.

Animals are not disposable, dependent on when we feel we've tolerated enough of their feeble presence when they are old and tired.