So, yesterday, my family said goodbye to Finley, one of our great danes.
We got her back in 2017 as a companion to Javert, and she was our first dane since Loki.
From the beginning, it was pretty clear that she hadn't had a particularly good start in life - she was a juvenile spay and had some behavioural issues that hinted that her previous owners had, at best, not been prepared for a giant breed dog. That's being charitable.
While she was genuinely clever and learned commands easily, she also had certain quirks that were clearly throwbacks to things she had experienced, so we learned to work around those where we needed to.
In recent years, she had started to show signs of senility, and while those weren't too hard to work around, her mobility also wasn't all it could be (mostly arthritis related).
In the past couple of weeks, we pursued some extra testing after noticing her eating habits becoming more irregular, and it came back with terminal liver cancer, which had spread to her gallbladder. At this stage, anything we could do would be palliative, which is all well and good, but we knew it was a matter of time, and we needed to make a decision on where the line was in terms of quality of life.
At the end of it, 10 years and a bit isn't too shabby for a rescue who had a bumpy start in life. My parents, cousin, and Javert were there with her at the end, and I'm hoping that this and the presence of Beckett will help Javert adjust to her absence.
