Summary Of 'The Last Meow' By Burkhard Bilger

In my family, we’re dog lovers. We love them so much that we adopted three of them. When our eldest dog, Shadow, fell ill, we were devastated. He would shake all through the night and he could not keep food down. We took him to the vet when we realized how persistent this was. They ran a blood panel on him only to find out that he was diabetic and his blood sugar was out of control. The vet gave us multiple suggestions for treating him, including insulin, an at home glucose monitor, or a glucose curve test under their supervision. At that point, we had to make a decision for our boy. We could tell he was suffering and we wanted to do right by him. Making the right choice for someone who does not have the ability to talk is a difficult decision, but as animal owners, we have a responsibility to care for our pets.

In “The Last Meow” by Burkhard Bilger, stories of sick animals and their owners making choices for their pets are written in multiple parts. His main point in the article is that we treat our furry family members so much like people, that when faced with the choices of medical treatments, we lay out everything to keep our pets alive.
With animals not being able to speak for themselves, we not only have to consider what is healthiest for them, but also what they might be feeling and going through. Bilger seemed to understand the complexity of animals shown in this quote, “Injured animals no doubt experience fear and pain: the parts of their brains that process those feelings (the amygdala, the thalamus, and the hypothalamus) are similar to ours, and animals often have keener senses” (Bilger). People have the power of the animal’s fate and with our emotions so tied to our pets, it is hard to let go, even when it is the right choice. I could only imagine how hard the decision to euthanize a pet must be, but we also need to think selflessly in our form of