LOSING an animal is sometimes worse than losing a relative. When my 18-year-old golden retriever was finally put out of her aged misery, I wept for days.

It may be shameful to admit but I didn't cry as much when my grandparents died.

At their funerals, tears pricked my eyes when I thought of my parents' loss, but when Bella bounded off to doggy heaven, I was inconsolable. Even though, ultimately, it had been my decision to say goodbye.

This week we decided to have one of our cats put down. And although we asked the vet to perform the final procedure, that didn't lessen our guilt at killing one of our pets. I was devastated.

Fluffy had been poorly since before Christmas, on a never-ending cycle of pills and potions, but nothing seemed to be working.

And while the vet would have been happy to persist (read: continue taking a lot of money from us) we decided enough was enough.

Fluffy was a very good-natured animal, getting on in cat years (he was 10), loving and "chatty", in a chirrupy cat way. But he was clearly fed up of being ill – and of us forcing terrible-tasting pills down his throat twice a day.

And to be perfectly frank, while our bank balance was precarious, it was the endless medicating, with no diagnosis or solution on the horizon, that had started to take its toll.

Fluffy was no longer a dear pet, he was a patient – and let's be honest, we have relatives to fulfil that role in our lives from time to time. We're not allowed to have them put down, we have to soldier on and keep caring, but animals are different.

A militant veggie friend was horrified when she found out our plans. To her, money should not have been a consideration. The daily grind of medicating should not have been an issue.

And she insisted we should remember Fluffy as he had been, and cling to that hope as we worked to make him better.

Fluffy wasn't allowed outside while being treated – his illness had confined him to a blanket-lined dog cage – and we'd had to change his diet, too. All told, it was pretty miserable for everyone.

The vet could offer no shining light of a cure and seemed to think that Fluffy would be taking daily pills for the rest of his days.

And while we might have been able to give him a better quality of life eventually, Fluffy would never be the same again.

We agonised for days before making our decision, wondering if we were contemplating euthanasia for our own sakes rather than considering what was in the cat's best interests.

But in the end, if a cat can't run, jump, hunt and eat, surely a cat's not a cat any more.