End of Life Assistance
Compassionate Veterinary End-of-Life Care: Providing Comfort and Support During Difficult Times
End of Life Care Services
Kipling Veterinary Hospital and Wellness Center’s End of Life Service provides pet owners supportive veterinary practices ensuring your pet comprehensive, compassionate, and respectful services during a challenging emotional time.
Age and Quality of Life Calculators
Age and Quality of Life Calculators may be of interest. If so, please visit our Community Links to find out more. These calculators have been designed to estimate dog and cat age and life quality.
Hospice Care and Pain Management for Pets with Terminal Illnesses:
- Provide comfort, pain relief, and support the best quality of life for pets in their final stages.
- What It Involves:
- Tailored medical care: This might include pain medications, wound care, special diets, and more, to ensure the pet is as comfortable as possible.
- Frequent check-ups: Regular monitoring by the veterinarian to adjust treatments, as necessary.
- Comfort measures: Things like soft bedding, quiet environments, or even simple comforts like favorite toys.
Support and Counseling for Pet Owners:
- Help pet owners cope with the emotional challenges of seeing their beloved pet in its final stages and making tough decisions.
- What It Involves:
- Grief counseling: Sessions with a counselor who specializes in pet loss.
- Support groups: Joining other pet owners who are going through similar experiences can provide a sense of community and understanding.
- Education: Understanding the pet’s condition, prognosis, and what to expect can help owners make informed decisions.
- Resources: Providing literature or references about pet grief, loss, and the decision-making process.
Euthanasia Services:
- Ensure a peaceful and humane end for pets when their quality of life has deteriorated to an extent where it is the kindest choice.
- What It Involves:
- Discussion and decision-making: The veterinarian and pet owner discuss when it is the right time, weighing the pet’s quality of life against the progression of its illness.
- The process: The veterinarian will explain how euthanasia works, and what the pet owner can expect. This typically involves an initial sedative followed by the euthanasia drug, ensuring the pet’s passing is painless and peaceful.
- Aftercare: The client and doctor discuss options for cremation, burial, and memorializing the pet.
- Comfort measures: We have a special room for euthanasia, designed to be calming and comforting for both the pet and the owner.
Cremation Services:
- Offer a respectful and dignified method of managing a pet’s remains after passing.
- What It Involves:
- Communal Cremation: This is a group cremation of multiple pets together. Ashes from group cremations are not available for the pet’s owners. This choice is typically more affordable.
- Private Cremation: One pet is cremated at a time, ensuring that the ashes returned belong solely to that pet. This option is more expensive but provides personal closure and keepsakes for pet owners.
Post-Cremation Care:
- Services and products that help memorialize and remember the pet.
- What It Involves:
- Ash retrieval: Safely packaging and returning ashes to pet owners.
- Memorial products: The pet’s owners select urns or keepsake jewelry, photo frames, or other memorabilia to store the pet’s ashes.
- Certificate of cremation: A document certifying the pet’s cremation, especially important for private cremations.
Grief Support and Counseling:
- Help and support pet owners emotionally during and after the cremation process.
- What It Involves:
- Referrals to grief counselors specializing in pet loss.
- Information on groups for pet owners navigating the grieving process.
- Resources, literature, and online platforms where owners can share memories of their pets.
- Please see our Community Links for more information.
The Rainbow Bridge
By Edna Clyne-Rekhy, 1959
Just this side of heaven is a place called Rainbow Bridge.
When an animal dies that has been especially close to someone here, that pet goes to Rainbow Bridge. There are meadows and hills for all of our special friends so they can run and play together. There is plenty of food, water and sunshine, and our friends are warm and comfortable.
All the animals who had been ill and old are restored to health and vigor. Those who were hurt or maimed are made whole and strong again, just as we remember them in our dreams of days and times gone by. The animals are happy and content, except for one small thing; they each miss someone very special to them, who had to be left behind.
They all run and play together, but the day comes when one suddenly stops and looks into the distance. His bright eyes are intent. His eager body quivers.
Suddenly he begins to run from the group, flying over the green grass, his legs carrying him faster and faster.
You have been spotted, and when you and your special friend finally meet, you cling together in joyous reunion, never to be parted again. The happy kisses rain upon your face; your hands again caress the beloved head, and you look once more into the trusting eyes of your pet, so long gone from your life but never absent from your heart.
Then you cross Rainbow Bridge together….
Edna Clyne-Rekhy, a Scottish artist and animal lover, wrote the poem “Rainbow Bridge” in 1959 to honor her dog, Major, who had recently passed away. The poem is about a place called Rainbow Bridge, which is “just this side of heaven” and where beloved pets can run and play together again with their owners. It has become a source of comfort for many pet owners who are grieving and offers hope that they will be reunited with their pets in the afterlife.
The poem was written in 1959 when she was 19 years old, out of her grief over the death of her first dog, a Labrador retriever named Major. When she got married, she showed the poem to her husband, who suggested she publish it. She thought it was too personal, so instead she typed out copies to give to some friends.
Read more: https://slate.com/technology/2023/12/pet-death-rainbow-bridge-poem-who-wrote-it.html