End-of-life care for cats benefits enormously from palliative medicine approaches that prioritize comfort, quality of life, and natural death or timely euthanasia over aggressive treatment.
Feline palliative care represents an important welfare advance that reframes end-of-life goals from disease management toward comfort and quality of life. The welfare priority shifts from extending lifespan to ensuring that the time remaining is as comfortable, engaged, and distress-free as possible. Pain and nausea — the most common comfort issues in dying cats — require proactive management rather than reactive response. Cats experience significant anxiety from repeated veterinary visits, making home-based palliative care often welfare-superior for the final weeks of life. Quality of life assessment using validated tools provides structured guidance for the most difficult decision — when to choose euthanasia rather than continue palliative management. The welfare goal is a natural death that occurs comfortably, or euthanasia that is chosen before significant suffering occurs rather than after.