I vividly remember the first time I watched an animal die. It was July 1997, and I sat crying on the floor of the vet's office, holding my dog as she drew her last breath.

In the two years that I've been working at The Marine Mammal Center I've lost count of the number of animals I've watched die. It's easier in that I don't have the emotional attachment to them that I did to my dog, but never ceases to affect me. I try to watch euthanasias with a detached, medical mindset ("So that's the best way to find the subclavian artery...") only because it makes it a little easier on me, but I never want to get too detached from it; as soon as death becomes too easy to deal with then life has less of a meaning.

Yesterday I watched another California sea lion be put to sleep. He had been admitted a day or two prior and had at least three severe seizures within that time. Tuesday morning we found him seizuring* in his pool, completely unconscious and unresponsive, yet his reflexes still brought him to the surface to breathe. (Diving mammals have incredible physiologies.) And last night I discovered that another animal, a yearling Steller's sea lion admitted late the previous evening, was dying and had to be euthanized.

I often wonder how the vets handle this. They are the ones administering the drugs, and they are the ones that have to make the final decision. I know that whenever we get a new vet on staff, it takes them awhile to become comfortable with deciding to euthanize an animal. That's something doctors never need to deal with.

It's odd, watching life drain away so quickly. Life is so fragile. And death is so ... permanent.

* A large number of the sea lions we admit are suffering from domoic acid toxicity (aka "red tide" poisoning). The Pseudo-nitzschia toxins increase as you move up the food chain, and in apex predators such as sea lions and humans it can cause damage to the hippocampus of the brain, resulting in hippocampal atrophy, short-term memory loss, confusion and erratic behaviour, seizures, and death.