How Our Love Expands: Euthanasia, Elroi, and What Humans Owe to Creation

A Meditation on the Goodest Boy

On Loving Our Dog

In three days, we will put our dog to sleep. His name is Elroi, first and last of his name. He came to us when we had no children, in a time when we felt overlooked and disappointed, when he was four years old and lost in a shelter. And he will leave us, having been in our home for ten years, loved by us and two children who know no world except one with Elroi in it.

Elroi has been, even when barking at the neighbors in the middle of the night, a gift of God’s grace. Sarah has never been a dog person, but I was, and so, for my birthday, she surprised me by taking me to the local shelter to look at adopting a dog. The rest of the dogs lept at the bars of their cages, barking loudly at our presence, but Elroi lay in his bed, turned his head to briefly see us, and then lay back down.

They told us that “he’s a sweet dog, but just gets overlooked”. I understood the feeling. At the time, I was in my third year of applying for jobs, with little success, our second year of hoping for a child, with no success, and feeling much like this strange mutt. We hit it off slowly, and named him Elroi, after the story of Hagaar, the first person in Scripture to give God a name: “The God who sees me.” Elroi and I had seen each other, and God has seen us both.

Elroi is somewhere between a Chihuahua and a terrier, larger and more docile than his Mexican cousins, and a gentle fit for our home. Some months ago, he had a stroke and for a time was back to his old self, but has since that time declined significantly. The details don’t really matter, except to say that it’s time. As he’s approached 15 years old, we knew his time was drawing to a close, as it will for all creatures. His steps shortened, and his naps have lengthened, and with it his confusion and his frailty.

And therein came the surprise: that the possibility of having this beloved creature put to sleep made sense, but only as an impossibility that I cannot resolve.

My favorite picture of him, over eight years ago, with our oldest.

A History of Death: Euthanasia’s Permissibility

As someone who has taught biomedical ethics this past year, the events of this week bring up a number of conflicted feelings, not about when euthanasia can be used among humans, but why we turn to it here, particularly when it is no less an issue of a loved being at stake. Increasingly, the advocacy for euthanasia among humans is argued for as an act of compassion, a description I’m loathe to adopt for no other reason than it seems nonsensical to call the destruction of something loving.

The legal distinctions between active and passive euthanasia is an important one here—the difference between hastening a person’s death and refraining from additional care which would prolong suffering—and it is a distinction that has all but been obliterated in many countries. Until the late 1980s, active euthanasia was illegal in every state and country, and has since been adopted by an increasing number of countries for various conditions. The debates over this are ancient, and even in the U.S., date back to the 19th century, but a tipping point seems to have happened that there may be little going back from.

Canada has been the worst here. Since 2016, through the MAID system (Medical Assistance in Dying), Canada began allowing those with terminal illness and “irremedial suffering” to enter into a bureaucratic process which qualifies them for government assistance in committing suicide. This limit was expanded gradually to those with only suffering, and finally, last year, began a phase-in period to include those with mental illness and no other underlying conditions.

Cards on the table: I do not think there are relevant conditions to allow for physician-assisted suicide. I say this after having taught the question for students, having read the legal discussions, and having read the relevant literature from physicians, philosophers, and the Christian tradition on the question. In the end, it turns on two distinctions: 1) the ability of our suffering to be offered to God as a vehicle for our sanctification¹, and 2) the claim of Scripture that humans bear a particular relation to God as image-bearing beings of God.

But now, Elroi comes back into view, and with him, the question of why such an act is permissible here, but not elsewhere.

Peter Singer, Australian philosopher, has made the argument that such convictions regarding human life are forms of speciesism: that we offer humans a special place in the world on an unjust basis, and in doing so, proscribe cruelty to animals we would reject for humans.² On the flip side, though, it means for Singer that humans don’t avail ourselves of possibilities for relieving suffering that we would for non-human animals.

His case for the expansion of active euthanasia to humans is influential, and worth hearing at length. In the clip below, you can see where the logic goes: it may be permissible to expand this not just to those suffering endlessly who know it, but also to those incapable of expressing their suffering, such as infants.

For a more full debate on this question, Christian bioethicist Charlie Camosy engages Singer on this. Also long, but worth your time:

The Expansion of Our Love

Singer is correct on this point: the traditional bias against non-human animals frequently turns on criteria which can’t be sustained. There’s a growing body of evidence to suggest that many more animals than we previous suspected have lives which are rich, meaningful, prospective, and emotionally complex. For Singer, this means that that humans and non-human animals aren’t that much different in ways which lead us to be compassionate toward our pets and expansive in our use of euthanasia toward humans.

But I want to suggest that the opposite direction is true: that the blurring of distinctions between humans and non-human animals means that the vision of care we give to humans should be analogously expanded to animals. The compassion and attention we give toward our human loved ones is no less owed to the non-humans, in a minimal sense at least. The upshot is this: that undue suffering is not appropriate to animals any more than humans—that that love which we owe to humans provides a basis for being more attentive and compassionate toward humans, and thus more hesitant to apply death to animals in the same way that we do for humans.

Contra Singer, we should not be willing to apply a non-human prescription to humans, but be less eager to apply a dehumanized prescription to non-humans.

Does this mean intensive care units for non-human animals? I don’t think so. Does it mean a much less eager reach for death for them? Yes.

Teasing out what distinctions there are between humans and non-humans gets us back into what I wrote earlier, and into another affirmation: that the moral lives of humans—as bearers of God’s image—is different than that of animals, and that “moral lives” doesn’t have much meaning for non-human animals, but not because they the non-human world is without orders and discernible laws. What there is in terms of an ordering of the non-human world is that which is appropriate to them as the creatures they are, and remains beyond the veil of their animality, known by God but undisclosed to humans, I think.

All of this gives me pause as I called the vet today to schedule the appointment on Friday. All of this makes me realize the gravity with proscribing this for Elroi what I cannot for humans. This link of love—expanded outward from humans to all that which God has created and loves—bears within it distinctions of what is owed in death and life, but not ultimately those we humans can separate ourselves from except at the risk of shrinking back from the hard places the love of God will take us to.

What comes in the love of our animals is not a destruction of their difference from humans, but a recognition that we owe so much more to them than we frequently give. The love we give to one another as humans can—and should—be offered to outward in analogy, insofar as the non-human world has its own purring logic and order which God gives in analogy. Love turns us outward to more things, not fewer, and makes us slower to act in ways of harm.

And so, on Friday, after it’s all said and done, I’ll take Elroi and bury him in our yard, to give him the honor due him as the beloved creature that he is, both to God and to us. We’ll be with him in the end and hope for some kind of reunion, for it is not just humans that are made new in the end of all things, but that creation which God has loved, and perhaps, those parts of the old creation loved most by the humans.

1. This is an enormous question which I won’t get into here, but the assumption that suffering is that which medicine should end through administering death runs aground on the assumption that suffering in and of itself is to be avoided. To be sure, there is suffering that does little to nothing but degrade us, and there is no inherent relation between a person’s suffering and their sanctification. But to equate relief from suffering with death, particularly in the overarching context of financially constrained systems, is to make relief from suffering a matter of technocratic efficiency, not moral deliberation.

2. In particular, see Singer’s classic Animal Liberation.