Pet owners have the right, after all, to refuse treatment for their terminally ill pets. That’s the upshot of a ruling by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts in the USA earlier this year in a case of animal cruelty brought against a woman who refused to have her terminally ill dog put down.
Mary Ann Russo from Weymouth in the commonwealth of Massachusetts took her 14-year-old cocker spaniel, Tipper, to an animal hospital twice in 2020 after discovering he had a large tumour. A veterinarian there recommended that Tipper be put to sleep, but Russo refused and took him back home.
The veterinarian filed a complaint with the Animal Rescue League. Officers who came to check on Tipper said he was barely breathing. They obtained a warrant to put the suffering animal down.
Prosecutors said Tipper was in pain beyond control, and Russo allowed it to go on, taking no steps to reduce the dog’s suffering. “While death is inevitable for all living creatures, suffering and pain is not,” Assistant District Attorney Tracey Cusick told the Supreme Judicial Court in March.
The criminal case against Russo was rejected by a lower court, which found that she had not violated the animal cruelty statute in her decision to ignore the veterinarian’s advice to euthanize Tipper. The order was upheld by an appeals court.
Following this, the Supreme Judicial Court had to decide if the case should go to trial. In July, the court upheld the lower court’s dismissal of the case, while saying the decision did not necessarily condone Russo’s actions or take a moral stance on the situation, according to a report by NBC10Boston. “Our opinion should not be read to condone the conduct alleged in the complaint or take a position one way or the other regarding ‘complicated’ and ‘heartbreaking’ end-of-life decisions,” the 20-page majority opinion said. “Instead, we hold, on these facts, that the defendant committed no crime.”
According to the judgment, written by Judge Frank Gaziano, defendants must “knowingly” and “willfully” subject an animal to “unnecessary torture, suffering or cruelty of any kind” to establish a violation of the Massachusetts animal cruelty statute. The fact that Russo took Tipper twice to the VCA South Shore Animal Hospital for medical aid showed, the justices held, that she did not fit the bill.
