Why MAiD Is Not the Same as Euthanizing a Pet

A personal story

I'll never forget holding Jazzie, our beloved Basenji-shepherd mix, as she took her last breath. A companion of nine years, she developed joint issues that left her in constant pain. Months of medication and steroid treatment could not stave off the inevitable. We laid her on the grass, sunshine on her face, love all around. The first injection gently but quickly put her to sleep. The second stopped her heart. She was gone in seconds. We wept. We thanked her for her spirit. We returned her to God with a prayer. The grief lingered for weeks, months—it never fully leaves.

And I will never forget the human souls I have supported through Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD). People I knew only briefly, yet who remain deeply imprinted on my heart. They had pursued treatments. They had endured pain. They saw their deaths approaching. Yet standing beside their beds—sunshine on their faces, love all around—as the same two injections were administered, the experience felt fundamentally different.

Why?

The Surface Similarity

At first glance, euthanizing a beloved pet and assisting a human death can appear morally parallel: both are framed as compassionate responses to suffering. But beneath the surface lies a significant existential distinction rooted in the structure of human consciousness.

Animals clearly possess rich inner lives. Research in ethology and comparative cognition demonstrates emotional complexity, memory, social bonds, and even limited forms of self-monitoring in some species. I am not claiming animals lack awareness, memory, or subjective experience. Nor am I denying that certain species display impressive cognitive capacities.

The distinction I am drawing is narrower and more specific.

The kind of self that generates existential distress in humans—the symbolic, narrative, culturally scaffolded ego-identity rooted in reflexive and metacognitive awareness—is far more characteristic of human beings than of other animals.

The Structure of Human Selfhood

Humans possess an unusually robust capacity for reflexive awareness: we are aware that we are aware. We do not merely feel fear; we can think about our fear, narrate it, interpret it, and project it into imagined futures. We build autobiographical identities across time. We live not only in immediate experience, but in story.

While some animals show what researchers call “episodic-like” memory or even limited self-recognition, the evidence for fully developed autonoetic consciousness—a self that experiences itself as persisting across time and constructs symbolic narratives about that self—is strongest in humans. It is this narrative selfhood that underlies what we commonly call ego-identity.

This difference shapes how we suffer and how we die.

Animals suffer primarily at the level of physical and emotional experience. Humans, in addition to physical suffering, experience existential suffering: fear of loss of autonomy, loss of identity, loss of dignity, loss of meaning, and anticipation of future decline.

Animals live predominantly in presence. Humans live in narrative continuity.

Animals die as biological organisms. Humans die as self-interpreting beings.

Animals suffer physically; humans suffer existentially. Animals live in presence; humans live in story. Animals die into nature; humans die into meaning.

This is why euthanasia for a beloved pet can feel morally intuitive—because it is understood primarily as the relief of physical suffering. MAiD, however, is sought most often in the context of existential distress.

Data from jurisdictions where assisted dying is legal consistently show that the most commonly cited reasons for requesting MAiD are loss of autonomy, inability to engage in meaningful activities, loss of dignity, fear of physical suffering that is to come, and fear of becoming a burden. Uncontrolled physical pain is rarely the primary driver.

These motivations are not simply sensory experiences; they are threats to ego-identity—the narrative self constructed over decades of roles, responsibilities, achievements, and relationships. They cresult in existential or spiritual distress, which is, ironically, often relieved my MAiD , for that choice gives one control over their end.

The ego is not a flaw. It is a developmental achievement. It allows us to function socially, assume responsibility, and build meaning. But as serious illness progresses and independence erodes, that same narrative self may experience profound destabilization.

Here is where a deeper question emerges.

Ego-Deconstruction at the End of Life

As we move closer to death, roles fall away and control diminishes, and something unexpected sometimes occurs. The tightening of identity can soften. The need to defend the narrative self may ease. Patients often reconcile relationships, reframe their life stories, express gratitude, and describe moments of widened awareness or peace. Not universally, and not without struggle—but with surprising frequency.

Some researchers describe this as meaning-making. Others speak of dignity therapy, or existential integration. It cumulates in nearing-death awareness—the expansion of consciousness to mystical states of being. This is universal, across cultures, belief systems, or any other demographic variable. It is surrender of the personal self and the revealing of one's essential nature—a state I believe animals naturally rest in all the time.

I describe it as a functional deconstruction of ego-identity—a loosening of the narrative self that can open into a different mode of being. Not annihilation, but simplification. Not collapse, but release.

This does not mean suffering is redemptive by default. Existential distress is real, often intense, and deserving of serious clinical attention. It is also, importantly, responsive to psychological, relational, and spiritual care. Compassion never means abandoning someone to fear. It means accompanying them with skill and depth.

The question is whether MAiD truncates a uniquely human developmental process—the gradual transformation of narrative identity in the face of mortality. This is the final state of human development as explored in spiritual traditions: trancendence. Here, outr true nature is realized, that which was constant beneath the temporary story of identity. MAiD, in this respect, stems from the poverty of our spiritual intelligence. Autonomy is an intoxicant to the ego, and MAiD beecomes the ultimate act of self-preservation in the face of the process that naturally deconstructs it in the process of our transformation.

The Cultural Question

There is also a broader cultural dimension.

Euthanizing a suffering animal does not alter society’s understanding of vulnerability or medicine’s purpose. But when assisted death becomes normalized as a response to existential distress, it subtly reshapes our collective relationship to aging, dependence, and loss of autonomy. It risks reinforcing the idea that identity must be preserved at all costs, rather than transformed.

Across cultures and throughout history, human life has carried a distinct moral weight. This is reflected not only in religious traditions but in secular law and ethical systems. The loss of a beloved pet is deeply sorrowful. The loss of a human being is experienced as tragic. We intuitively recognize the difference because we recognize the depth of what is at stake: a self-aware consciousness capable of moral reflection, symbolic meaning-making, and narrative transformation.

The Deeper Ethical Question

The difference between euthanizing a pet and ending a human life does not rest on sentiment alone. It rests on the structure of human selfhood. Dying is not merely biological cessation. For human beings, it is the unwinding of a story. Because of this, the most humane response to the end of life is not simply the elimination of suffering, but care that understands the full depth of the human experience of dying. At its best, this exactly is what good palliative care provides:

• Skilled pain and symptom management that relieves physical suffering.

• Compassionate accompaniment that honours the story of a life lived.

• Clear guidance about the natural course of dying, helping patients and families understand what to expect and reducing unnecessary fear.

• Care that recognizes both inherent dignity and functional dignity, affirming a person's worth even as independence declines.

The question before us is not whether suffering should be relieved — it must be. The deeper question is how we understand the uniquely human experience of identity, vulnerability, and transcendence at the end of life.

If we approach dying with courage, support, and intellectual honesty, we may discover that what appears at first to be only collapse can also become transformation.

References:

On Symbolic Cognition, Narrative Identity, and Human Selfhood

1. Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997).

2. Terrence W. Deacon, “On Human (Symbolic) Nature: How the Word Became Flesh,” in The Evolution of Human Language, ed. James R. Hurford et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

3. Michael Tomasello, “Understanding and Sharing Intentions: The Origins of Cultural Cognition,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28, no. 5 (2005): 675–691.

4. Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Thinking (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

5. Endel Tulving, “Episodic Memory and Autonoesis: Uniquely Human?” in The Missing Link in Cognition: Origins of Self-Reflective Consciousness, ed. Herbert S. Terrace and Janet Metcalfe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

6. Thomas Suddendorf and Michael C. Corballis, “The Evolution of Foresight: What Is Mental Time Travel, and Is It Unique to Humans?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30, no. 3 (2007): 299–313.

7. Derek C. Penn, Keith J. Holyoak, and Daniel J. Povinelli, “Darwin’s Mistake: Explaining the Discontinuity between Human and Nonhuman Minds,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31, no. 2 (2008): 109–178.

On Animal Episodic-Like Memory and Self-Monitoring

8. Nicola S. Clayton and Anthony Dickinson, “Episodic-like Memory during Cache Recovery by Scrub Jays,” Nature 395 (1998): 272–274.

9. Nicola S. Clayton, Anthony Dickinson, and colleagues, “Elements of Episodic-like Memory in Animals,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 358 (2003): 361–371.

10. William A. Roberts, “Are Animals Stuck in Time?” Psychological Bulletin 128, no. 3 (2002): 473–489.

11. Gordon G. Gallup Jr., “Chimpanzees: Self-Recognition,” Science 167, no. 3914 (1970): 86–87. (On mirror self-recognition; relevant for discussing limited forms of self-awareness.)

On Existential Distress as a Primary Driver of MAiD

12. Health Canada, Sixth Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada 2024 (Ottawa: Government of Canada, 2025).

13. James Downar et al., “What Drives Requests for Medical Assistance in Dying?” Canadian Medical Association Journal 195, no. 40 (2023): E1385–E1391.

14. Ellen Wiebe, Stephane Green, and colleagues, “Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada: A Chart Review of Patient Characteristics,” CMAJ Open 6, no. 3 (2018): E381–E387.

15. Oregon Health Authority, Oregon Death with Dignity Act: 2024 Data Summary (Portland: OHA, 2025).

16. Washington State Department of Health, Death with Dignity Act Report (Olympia: DOH, 2023).

17. Elisabeth A. Loggers et al., “Implementing a Death with Dignity Program at a Comprehensive Cancer Center,” New England Journal of Medicine 368 (2013): 1417–1424.