Resources

Quality of Life

Pain Scale

Your pet may be in more pain that you think. These downloadable charts can help you determine the level of pain that your pet is struggling with:

Assessing Quality of Life

While not every pet follows the same path in decline, this graph depicts common end of life decline trajectories for those pets dealing with cancer, organ failure, or simply comorbidities that go along with old age, and can help inform and prepare us to support them.

Another helpful quality of life assessment tool is How Do I Know When It's Time? (from Ohio State University)

Hospet is an online tool for tracking your pet's quality of life.

Grief Support

To lose a beloved pet is to lose a family member and these feelings can be overwhelming. To compound this, we live in a society that doesn't always recognize the significance of this loss for many—so much so that our industry has begun to call this phenomenon "disenfranchised grief," because surrounding messaging (even from those well-intentioned) can sometimes convey that we shouldn't take it so hard because they were "just a pet."

But of course they weren't! We are not trained psychologists, but we understand the weight of this grief and the need for support, having gone through it ourselves. Listed below are websites that can assist individuals and families:

Education and Support Services