My 17 year old dog has reached the end of her ability to live without pain and struggle. She's a German Shepherd-Beagle mix and has a been a wonderful member of the family since we got her as a tiny puppy.

I have no idea how to walk through this process with my kids, especially my daughter. She's 7 and not to divulge too much, but she has struggled with emotional regulation for most of her life. A lot of her issues are in the past, but I worry about how she will handle processing this news. I don't think she has any concept of this as a real possibility despite me bringing it up over the past year. Maybe I should have been more explicit about our dog, but I've mostly kept it at a distant topic - "when dogs reach the end of their life, it's the owners who have to make the decision to help them go peacefully." But I've yet to say, "Our dog is going to be put down."

Here's the other issue: my dog is still physically in good shape. She has arthritis and some balance issues, but she can still trot around the house just fine. She gets the zoomies. She's still eating. She takes trazadone at night and sleeps fine. My daughter thinks she's just a normal dog.

But her quality of life is terrible. She won't go for walks. She wants zero attention or affection. She has incontinence issues. She shits in the house all the time. She'll fall down and struggle to get up occasionally. She paces the house constantly--like literally constantly--looking for food. She acts like she hasn't eaten no matter how much we've fed her. She'll stand by her bowl drooling and panting super hard. She gets anxiety over the strangest things. I've found her in a corner panting and drooling because...? She's deaf. She sometimes walks into the window over and over again because she doesn't realize it's a window. She crawls underneath chairs looking for food and gets stuck. She'll sometimes stand in a room in a daze for like 10 minutes.

I do hate to say it, but if I'm being honest, she's become a significant burden. We've tried different medications over the past few years, and they always make her sick.

But my daughter doesn't realize how abnormal it is. She talks about how much she loves the dog and how she's so fun. She doesn't realize that the dog pacing through the house isn't her being silly and that she's out of her mind.

I know the OT is the right place...but I really don't know how to tell her. I think she's going to reject the idea and see me as someone murdering her dog.

And when I do tell her, do I tell her far in advance? Like in a few weeks we're putting the dog down? The night before? Two days before?

We're also so busy that there's never a good time for this. There's no break in the schedule to grieve.

I've had dogs my entire life. They've always gotten either so old and decrepit that it was obviously they needed to be put out of their suffering or they've gotten a terminal illness that made it a necessity. This "cognitive decline but still moving just fine" is way harder than anything I've ever experienced with an animal.