Hello, I’m Pippin, and I’m a guinea pig. Today I’m going to talk about Quality of Life. It was quite difficult to find something beginning with Q that hadn’t already been done.

We’re helping out our Mummy, Jemima Pett, who is doing the A2Z this year by putting together all the posts we’ve done here on George’s Guinea Pig World, to make a book on Guinea Pig Care from A to Z. You can see her posts here: jemimapett.com/blog/. We’re filling in the gaps this month.

Quality of Life

People often talk about animals having a decent quality of life, and if they haven’t is it fair to the animal to keep trying to make them better. It’s a test that vets are asked to make when someone wants to euthanise their pet. But the owner of the animal has to judge it most.

Mummy has only had to choose to end two pigs’ lives, Dougall and Oscar. She says both had the same horrible shrinking disease, which CCT recognised as a disease, but vets at present only recognise as a collection of symptoms. Mummy gave Dr Sally permission to do an autopsy on Oscar, to see if she could learn from his death. She found he had heart trouble, and liver trouble, and other than those, which he had meds for, there was nothing to define a disease. CCT have seen a lot of pigs with the same shrinking disease and agree with the appearance of heart and liver disease. But as Mummy understood it, their hypothesis was the underlying cause was fungal infection at an early age, which caused tissue damage. Whatever the reason, and despite the best meds for their condition, both of them started to shrink. Not just lose weight, but to almost revert to the baby pig they had been.

Mummy said it was horrible to watch Dougall get worse, and Dylan was beside himself with worry, but there was nothing they could do but give him meds and feed him Emeraid several times a day. And at the last he looked just like he had at six months old. When Oscar went down the same track, Mummy knew there was nothing more that could be done for him.

So whereas Colman lived a full life to the end, despite having lots of meds and Emeraid, he went over the Rainbow Bridge of his own accord. Dougall and Oscar were just holding on, not happy with their situation, not enjoying life. And that’s the sort of judgement that Mummy and the vets make when they think about the Quality of Life.

There are lots of pigs who have quite serious illnesses but still get a lot out of life. Auntie Vikki had a group of retired piggies, some elderly, some that had strokes, and one who was blind. But they all got on together, came out for food and grass, played and chatted with each other, and seemed very content. They might not have the full quality of life that I have, but they had good Quality of Life. They were well, not in pain, and enjoyed their time.

It’s a very difficult thing for a piggy parent, or a pet parent of any animal, to decide that their loved one is no longer having a decent quality of life. There’s a lot of debate about quality of life for people, too, but very few countries allow euthanasia. Even for someone who can’t communicate, they make them hold on, even if they are in constant pain. The trouble, really is knowing whether someone is in pain, whether they have lost all that is okay in life, let alone good.

Mummy says sometimes she thinks she may go too far trying to help a pig reach his natural end. When the end is in sight, should one help it get closer? Or just wait for it to arrive all in good time?

I think I’d rather wait till it happened, but if I was in a lot of pain, and didn’t want to talk to anyone, just lie there and be unhappy, I think I wouldn’t mind a helping hand. But how would Mummy know? And sometimes, we can get better. For a while, at any rate. Like Ludo. I think he was close to being euthanised when his lump grew, but Dr Rebekah said she’d try the op, and it worked! Ludo had several days of being very happy again without it before he lay down and went to sleep forever.

I’m glad I’m not Mummy. Or a vet. I don’t want to have to decide these things.

Let’s do something a bit happier for R tomorrow.

love

Pippin xxx