A sad Good-bye

After a lot of soul-searching and discussion, Chris and I came to the very difficult decision that it was time to say Good-bye to our beautiful Chico. He has had a short life, and a difficult one and we like to think we made it as happy for him as we could. Since his accident eighteen months ago, which resulted in the amputation of his front leg, he has not been the same dog. He made good progress on three legs, and ran around our flat, hard surface yard with relative ease, but he was starting to stumble more, and seemed to be finding running more hard work. We know the blow to his head also caused partial or complete blindness in one eye and he bumped into things, and people, which sometimes made him snap. Added to that was his size and strength. He had to carry a lot of weight for his size on three legs, but he was still massively stronger than the other two, and we had reached the point where not even Chris could hold him securely, and I certainly couldn't. He was a dog who needed to have long runs, but the terrain here is far too uneven for him, so we couldn't take him to the campo. This wasn't very fair on the other two, as they didn't get taken out very often either. We knew Chico barked non-stop when ever we went out without him. He was leader of the pack, and was becoming too dominant so that the two girls were becoming very wary of him, and because he could snap I didn't trust him when anyone came to the house. He always had to be shut away round the back. He was a lovely dog , and no trouble when it was just us two, and there were no distractions, but the situation was getting worse and we knew that we couldn't go on the way we were. He was also showing signs of some pain in his hips which would eventually get worse. So all in all we did not think that it was a real kindness to keep him. We took him to the vet and she agreed that it was the right thing to put him to sleep, so sadly today we said Good-bye to him. We will miss him so much. He was a part of our family. The girls are very quiet today, and are probably wondering when he is coming back, but they still have each other for company, and we now intend to start taking them out regularly again, so their life will be better.

I decided to do a blog post about this as many of my followers have been out here and met Chico, and have followed his trials and tribulations through these pages. I will link it to the boys e-mails too just to save me saying the same thing over and over.

Good-bye lovely boy. I am sorry we couldn't do more for you, but we did the best we could.