--->Why HUMANE for Vets to KILL, but not ME?

As someone else previously mentioned it is not who does the killing, but how it is done. As far as I know there are not laws prohibiting you from putting an animal down, but there are laws against torturing them or treating them inhumanely. For most people it is easier to get the vet to do it or animal control as they do not want to be the one personally doing it. If you are of strong enough character to put your own animals down without doing it for sport (other than hunting) and your intention is to relieve the animal of suffering, then more power to you. I personally could not put my own dogs to sleep. As far as whether eating dog or cat is gross, that is purely an American conception, as most other countries do eat them. Most of the American laws against their consumption came about to protect people from getting their animals stolen to be used for this purpose. We as a society have dictated that eating cats and dogs are taboo. Butchers and meat processing plants are heavily regulated and do use humane methods to destroy the animals they are processing for consumption. What seem like brutal methods to the average person are in fact humane in nature. What makes a process humane is whether the animal has prolonged suffering, like bleeding to death, or dies instantly, as in the case of a gunshot to the head. As far as farm animals are concerned, in my experience, the people put their own animals down due to necessity. If you live 50 miles from the nearest vet and you have a cow suffering in delivering a calf, it is more humane for you to put the aminal down than to wait for the vet to arrive, who will most likely not make it before the animal bleeds to death.

Vets provide a service to a pet owner by taking an animal out of this life in the most humane and aesthetic way possible. Other methods that are just as painless, but more traumatic to the owner, are felt to be cruel today, possibly because people assume that just because someone can stand to look at the severed head of their beloved dog means the person himself must be evil. "Cruelty" isn't what people are objecting to; it's actually cold-bloodedness. But even the most cold-blooded person on earth can be kind.Another thing people object to is when "the average joe" kills an animal for no reason. If they value animal life at all, killing animals without justification is a crime. When they say inhumane, they mean criminal. Reasons range from a squirrel getting into your garden bed to an alligator mauling a child; people draw their boundaries in different places.When someone shoots stray cats, people are shocked because they assume the cats have some value higher than what they consider vermin. They like cats. The value they attach to them comes from the good experiences they've had with house cats, and they don't distinguish house cats with their lifetime of training and socialization from feral cats, who live for themselves alone.Since we became distanced from death---dogs die in vet's offices, cattle die in slaughterhouses, people die in hospitals---we put taboos around death that doesn't occur in its proper place. Death is regulated. What starts out as discomfort with strangeness becomes a binding rule, or even, as you mentioned, a law.