Sad News About Bentley

With great sorrow we had Bentley put to sleep. He was a lovely great friendly giant, 99.999% of the time. However very occasionally he would be aggressive to the others, and because of his size, he had the power to hurt them. He’d snapped at Alfie in the summer and had given him puncture wounds in his head, and he snapped again at him this week and Alfie had puncture wounds in his back and he probably had a lucky escape. He has in the past snapped at Sam and Bob.

Part of the problem was that there was no consistency with when he turned nasty. When he snapped at Alfie during the summer it was over food, yet vast majority of time he was absolutely fine around food and if some crumbs fell on the floor he’d quite happily let Pixie nip in and get them. He had no problems with ‘his space’ yet when he snapped at Alfie this week it appeared that Alfie was just in his space. He played wonderfully with Henry, and seemed to have no problem adjusting his play to small dogs, however he couldn’t control his snapping accordingly. His problems seemed to be down to insecurity and he would occasionally and randomly feel threatened and this was probably due to his start in life.

We felt that it was a little like a ticking bomb. Bentley may have been fine for another few months, but at some time he would hurt one of the others again.

We could not with a clear conscience rehome him knowing that he had the potential to injure or damage another dog. And given that his problems were due to insecurity then we could not guarantee that he would not show more problems if he was different people. We also did not want him to go as a guard dog, as he would be chained and this would have been a terrible life for him and anyway, he would have been a rubbish guard dog. So we decided that the only course of action as loving owners was to have him put to sleep. He really didn’t know anything about what was going on as the vet came to us and it was over quickly.

If his problems had been greater, it would have been easier. If they had been significantly greater we would never have kept him in the first place, if his problems had been consistent we could have addressed the issue that triggered them, however there was this tiny percentage of time when he was a danger to the others and we just wouldn’t know what would trigger it, and we recognised that if we didn’t do it now, we could be in the position where he killed one of the others and we then would have lost two pets.

We feel pretty terrible, however we know that we gave him a great three years – three years he would definitely not have had if we hadn’t have helped him in the first place.