Palliative and hospice care for companion animals is a growing field focused on maximising quality of life and minimising suffering for pets with terminal or serious chronic illness.
Animals facing terminal illness deserve the same compassionate end-of-life care that human palliative medicine provides. Pain in dying animals is often undertreated: many conditions including cancer, organ failure and neurological disease cause significant chronic pain that requires active multimodal management. Respiratory distress, nausea, anxiety and loss of mobility all reduce quality of life and require specific interventions. Veterinary hospice care integrates physical symptom management with support for the human-animal bond during the dying process. A good death — peaceful, pain-free, and ideally at home — is achievable for most companion animals. Euthanasia remains an important welfare tool when suffering cannot be adequately controlled.