Thirteen years. That’s how long she’d been part of our lives, long enough that I genuinely couldn’t remember what it sounded like without her.

And then I came home, and it was quiet.

Not sad-quiet. Just quiet. No little thud of paws on the floorboards. No small, insistent voice telling me I was late with dinner. I stood in the kitchen for a moment and realised I was listening for her, out of habit, the way you’d reach for a light switch that isn’t there anymore.

We’d made the decision to have her euthanised when her health could no longer be sustained, when it was no longer fair to her to keep going, given the pain and suffering she was in. It was the right decision. It was still a strange, hollow kind of grief. The kind nobody quite prepares you for, because somehow we’re taught that grieving a pet is supposed to be a smaller thing than grieving a person. It isn’t. It’s just different.

“Grief doesn’t have scales”

In Episode 66 of the Don’t Be Caught Dead podcast, I spoke with Barbara Allen, the Founder of Australia's Animal Chaplaincy Program and the first chaplain at the Lort Smith Animal Hospital. Early in our conversation, she shared a line with me: we don’t have scales for grief. We don’t say we hold this much grief for a partner and this much for a dog. Grief, she told me, is about the bond and the love, not the species it happened to arrive in, whether that companion had four legs, wings, scales, or two.

Barbara also spoke plainly about something that makes pet loss its own particular kind of heavy: the guilt bound up in the decision itself. Because so often it’s us, the owner, the carer, sitting across from the vet, having to make the call. She was firm that this decision should never be made alone, always alongside veterinary advice, because without that, people replay it endlessly. I should have waited a day. I should have known sooner. I recognised every part of that.

“Every pet deserves a good death”

Last week I spoke with Alicia Kennedy for this show, episode 106, an end-of-life veterinarian and the founder of Cherished Pets. Something she said: every pet deserves a good death, and every person deserves choice in how they say goodbye.

Alicia’s guiding principles for this work are simple but they carry weight: the condition needs to be terminal, the suffering needs to be becoming irreversible, and, the one people don’t always think about, there’s the question of the human’s capacity to keep providing for their pet’s changing needs. Because she’s seen the opposite too often: pets suffering not from neglect, but from love. People who can’t bear to let go, even when letting go is the kindest thing left to do.

She told me about a dog who was fifteen, sick on and off, whose quality of life was clearly declining. Instead of waiting, the family asked themselves what they actually wanted that last day to look like. They checked the weather forecast. They picked a sunny Tuesday. The dog went to the beach, had an ice cream, and passed peacefully in the garden, surrounded by the people who loved her.

That’s not a small thing. That’s planning, applied to love.

What is the “Human-Animal Bond,” really?

Alicia has a name for the thing at the centre of all this. She calls it HAB, the Human-Animal Bond, and she’s spent her career trying to get it taken seriously as a matter of health, not just sentiment.

She points to a real evidence base behind it: pets are linked to better cardiovascular health, shorter hospital stays, and reduced loneliness. Dogs in particular act as a catalyst for conversation, getting people out of the house and connecting with others they’d otherwise never speak to. And she notes this bond has only intensified in recent years, as disconnection and isolation have risen alongside technology, and especially since Covid.

But Alicia is careful to say the bond cuts both ways. If someone vulnerable has a pet who’s unwell and they don’t have the resources to care for them, that same bond can flip from comfort into a major source of anxiety and anguish. Which is exactly why she wants the human-animal bond built into aged care, disability, mental health, and homelessness services rather than treated as a private extra. In her view, protecting it isn’t one person’s job. It needs government, industry, philanthropy and individuals all playing a part, alongside every one of us having our own plan.

Why does “planning” always feel like the hard part?

At Cherished Pets, Alicia told me, every single person on their home care assistance program has an emergency care plan for their pet, because if something happens to you, if you end up in hospital with no one else at home, someone still needs to know what happens next for the one you love.

It sounds obvious once you hear it. And yet, how many of us have actually written that down?

I think about this constantly in the work I do around end-of-life planning, because the truth is, this isn’t really about pets. It’s about all the quiet, essential information sitting only in our heads.

The rabbit that nearly went unmedicated

While we were building the Critical Info Platform for this very work, a place to store exactly this kind of critical information, our own developer had a moment of realisation. He was the only person who knew his kids’ pet rabbit’s medication. Not written down anywhere. Not shared with his partner. Just in his head.

If something had happened to him, even for a few days, nobody else would have known what that rabbit needed to stay alive.

It’s such a small, ordinary example. But that’s exactly the point. It’s the small, ordinary things that fall through the cracks, because we assume we’ll always be the one there to remember them.

So, a few questions for you

Alicia asks her clients how they want their pet’s last day to be. I’d add a few more, for right now, while nothing is wrong at all:

● Does someone else know what your pet’s medication is, and when it’s due?

● Does someone else know your vet’s name and number?

● If you ended up in hospital tomorrow, unexpectedly, who would know to feed them tonight?

● Have you actually told that person where this information lives?

Alicia makes a point of asking doctors, quite directly, whether they’re asking their patients if they have a pet at home, because if they’re not, they’re not fully serving that person’s wellbeing. Our pets are woven into our lives so completely that leaving them out of our planning isn’t an oversight. It’s a gap.

The quiet house, and what it taught me

I still think about those first few days. What I’ve come to understand is that the sting of that silence wasn’t really about the decision we made. That decision was an act of love, not a failure of one. The sting was just missing her.

Barbara put something else beautifully too: an animal’s life is so short, and we don’t really do the maths on that while we still have them. Thirteen years never feels like enough, because it isn’t meant to.

But the planning, the parts we did get right, and the parts, like that rabbit’s medication, that reminded us how easily something small can be missed, that’s the part within our control. We can’t plan away grief. We can plan so our loved ones, two-legged and four, are never left without answers when we’re not there to give them.

You may not be ready to die, but at least you can be prepared.

Take care,

Catherine

Catherine is pictured here with Dr Alicia Kennedy at the ‘Death Down Under: Toward an Australian Death Studies’ Symposium hosted by the Australian Death Studies Society and held at the University of Melbourne on Friday 10th July, 2026.