This Mortal Coil - the Pet Edition

It has been a bad week for pets in Your Friendly Seeker's sphere of influence.

On Thursday last I had to have my own beloved cat put down. He had been fighting an inoperable stomach cancer for the past five months. The poor little guy has always been tougher than his rather dainty looks would suggest (he handily survived eight days in a tree with no food or water, for instance), but this was a battle he could not win. I had an appointment scheduled with the vet for Friday, where I was pretty much expecting the same result. He had been declining a bit faster than usual over the previous week, and I knew his time was coming. I was not, however, prepared for the sudden and dramatic turn for the worse he took between Wednesday and Thursday. On Thursday afternoon I came home from my walk and checked in on him, and realised that he had to go in immediately. For the previous few days he hadn't been eating or moving around much, but now he was just lying on his side, lacking even the strength to lie upright. He was now suffering, as far as I was concerned.

I rushed him to the vet and had my diagnosis confirmed. I stroked his head and forepaws as the injection was delivered, and continued to do so until he was gone. Needless to say I went through a considerable number of tissues.

I paid to have him cremated privately, and his remains will go in a little wooden box with a plaque. I owed him that much - he was a particularly awesome cat.
My wife had long refrained from bonding with him, because of my manly vow to not spend ridiculous amounts of money on medical care for a mere pet. Such a vow is easy to make when all is well and you are trying to maintain an image of logic and cool rationality. It all falls apart when your cat is stuck in a tree, or needs surgery. Suddenly price is no object (although I admit to feeling foolishly irrational as I forked over the cash for his various treatments). I always thought that when he eventually passed away it would be silly to do anything other than let him go into the mass cremation - until I faced that decision and suddenly it was worth the considerable expense to have him cremated separately and put in a little box with a plaque.
Foolish, right? Unnecessary, right? Sentimental, right?
Yeah, what's it to ya?
I'm going to miss the little guy. He was gorgeous, and knew it. He was clumsy, and didn't know it. He was affectionate to all humans (and never ever scratched or bit anyone in anger, his whole life) but a terror to other cats. He liked playing with dogs. If ever there was a piece of paper sticking out of something, or an open flap on a cardboard box, he felt compelled to tap on it repeatedly with his paw. I always referred to this as him sending messages back to the mother ship. Now that mother ship has called him home.

Friends of mine have recently had to take their young dog in for a medical procedure. It is a non-routine version of a normally routine procedure. All seems ot be well at this time, but apparently the young fellow was in some discomfort beforehand.

Other friends have recently discovered that one of their beloved cats has cancer as well, and they are going to do everything they can to prolong its life. Not an easy decision to make. I opted for palliative care for my cat rather than expensive treatments that may well extend the cat's life, but at the cost of its comfort (chemotherapy is generally a fairly miserable experience for humans, who are capable of understanding what is going on - how hard must it be for a cat, who only knows that it is sick?). But I could have conceivably made the other choice. Hard to say if a choice is wrong or right in these matters. It is never fun.

Why do we take these animals into our home and care for them? Yes, I know about companionship and such, although that fails to explain why we continue to do so even when we have human companions. I am actually not interested in all the reasons we do keep pets, but am instead talking about one specific thing:
Almost all pets have lifespans significantly shorter than ours. We get them when they are young, possibly, watch them grow to adulthood, get old, and die. Assuming we actually care for them (and people who don't really shouldn't have pets at all), we are setting ourselves up, time and again, for the grief associated with their passing. What's that all about? Why do we do that to ourselves? Is there some sort of lesson we learn about the human condition by facing the mortality of our junior partners over and over again?

It bears thinking upon.