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When Kennedy opened her own practice, in 2017, she offered in-home euthanasia, for clients who wanted their pets to die in a familiar place, rather than in the chaos of a vet’s office or emergency room. But sometimes people would call her because they weren’t sure if it was time for euthanasia, and she’d find that, with better pain control, some animals lived longer than anticipated. By clarifying the extent of a pet’s distress—a complicated task, given that animals often endure pain invisibly—Kennedy empowered owners to address suffering proactively. Local veterinarians quickly began to send her referrals for hospice and palliative care. “I kind of had to teach myself this art,” she told me. Aside from volunteering on a pet-loss hotline during veterinary school, she had received virtually no training on how to talk about death.
On a balmy October day, I joined Kennedy for a series of hospice visits in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Dressed in scrubs, with her hair pulled into a loose bun, she drove around town in a light-blue Subaru Crosstrek. In the trunk was a bag of euthanasia medications, intravenous-line kits, and patterned fleece blankets that she used to wrap pets after they died. “I choose one for each pet based on what I think they would like,” she told me. “It’s important that they have a soft place to land.”
When Sherri Hannan was twenty-seven, she adopted her first dog, a Labrador mix named Julio. She’d grown up with cats, and for many years dogs frightened her. “I thought they were scary and gross,” she told me. But when her husband, Ben, began to work overnight shifts for the municipal police department, Sherri wondered whether a dog could provide both company and security.