Good-Bye

Why.... hello there

Today Scott and I did the hardest thing we've done so far, we took Snickers to the vet for the last time and held her as she passed away, and it was medically induced. There were a lot of factors leading to this decision, but the main one was this: our beloved Basset Hound was aggressive. This confuses a lot of people because, I mean, she was a Basset Hound and they are supposed to be the most laid back of all the dogs, but this one wasn't. We don't really know Snickers' background, we got her from friends who were not able to keep her, and we're pretty sure she was from a backyard breeder, and we're also pretty sure she was a runt. Snickers weighed 35 pounds and that was a little heavy for her. Most of the bassets we have met are twice that size.

We had Snickers (or Snickerdoodle as we liked to call her, Snick Snick to others) around 3 and a half years, and we spent three of those years trying to train her to stop the aggression. It didn't work. When we bought our house her anxiety went up and the vet put her on Prozac. In the less then two years we've been in
the house her dose had up twice to the point that she was on the maximum amount possible. It didn't really make a difference. For the last three months Snickers' aggression had steadily been increasing to the point that for the last month she spent most of her time awake growling, snapping and snarling at us and voluntarily spending at least one night a week in her crate. Something was clearly wrong.

Snickers loved laying in the grass after chasing geese

When we talked to the vet about it a week ago she told us to give her a few days to see if she could find out any other information about what could be causing her aggression, but she did warn us that there was a good chance that putting Snickers' to sleep was going to be the best option. Wednesday she called us to let us know that she was recommending that we put Snickers' to sleep. She talked to all the rescue groups in the area she could think of, none would take her because of the aggression. There were no more medicines we could try, something was truly wrong with her brain. We could have opted to run a lot of tests to try to figure out what exactly that was, but the chances of it being treatable were slim. So we decided we were going to follow the vet's advice so today around 8:45am Snickers' passed away while Scott was holding her. It was fast (less than 30 seconds) and was just like she was going to sleep. It sucked, it was awful, but it was the right thing to do. Snickers was not happy, she was not mentally stable, and she was rapidly becoming dangerous.

One of my favorite pictures of Snickers from a couple months
ago. She had just finished eating a goldfish cracker without even
lifting her head up. Silly Puppy.

Luckily, Nico seems to be adjusting ok- it probably helps that he is completely distracted by the fact he is on the floor in front of us chewing on his bone- which is something he could NEVER do before because of Snickers' aggression. We do plan on getting another dog, but we're going to try to wait a month or two so that everything with Snickers feels settled. We know some people will not understand or approve of what we did, and we're sorry they will feel that way, but they did not deal with the constant struggle of having an aggressive dog and they clearly don't know how hard we worked with Snickers to try to prevent this exact thing from happening. For those of our friends and family who have supported us throughout the ordeal of trying to find ways to fix Snickers' aggression - thank you so much.


We love you Snickers and we are so sorry we had to do this, we will love you forever and hope that you enjoy snuggling up to Grandma, Gagoo and Dad Dad. Try not to steal too much of the pie that I'm sure Gagoo is feeding you... and don't destroy his trains.