Making the right decision isn’t always easy. Sometimes, the right thing to do isn’t always the choice that’s wrapped in pretty paper with bright ribbons, or the one decorated with flashing lights that spell out the words, “Pick Me!”

Sometimes, the right thing to do is the thing that just seems so wrong.

How many times have all of us looked at someone else’s decision and said, “I could have told them that wouldn’t work out.” I’m sure we’ve all done it more times than we can count.

The people who made the decision to euthanize the Maymont Bears are under a lot of criticism because of their decision. It was a decision that no one wanted to make, but in the end, the only decision they could make.

I’m an animal lover. But just because I like animals does not mean that I don’t like people or that I think that animals are more important than people. To make such an assumption would be both unfair and unreasonable.

In fact, it’s for the safety of the child, not the animals, that this decision, as painful as it was, turned out to be the correct one.

The Patrick’s Place Poll gave voters two choices: either euthanize the bears and perform the rabies test, or give the child the rabies preventative treatment. Ninety-two percent of voters supported quarrantining the bears and giving the child the rabies treatment.

What really happened seems to have been a third option.

If the child had been receiving the treatment, then euthanizing the bears would definitely seem like an unreasonable extreme. But the child didn’t receive the shots, based on what we know from the multiple accounts. The child’s mom said she told health officials that she was willing to let her child have the shots. But according to the Mayor’s Report on what happened, on the day of the big meeting to decide the bears’ fate, the mother called the health department expert and allegedly told her that she “wished to obtain additional information about the rabies vaccine (to determine whether she would give it to her child)” and said she’d follow-up by noon that day.

Regardless of which account you believe, one fact seems to be consistent in both of them: by Thursday, the fifth day since the bite had happened, the child had received no shots. Time was quickly running out, since the shortest-known human rabies incubation period is only nine days.

No matter how much anger one has for the situation itself, no one can really believe that the child deserved to get rabies. You can’t allow a child to come down with a 100% fatal illness just to teach some kind of lesson. And you can’t take a gamble with a child’s life when there’s no way to know for sure how long the incubation period in the animals might be.

No matter how “low risk” bears have been shown to be when it comes to rabies, the bears shared their habitat with red foxes, which have a higher risk and it was always possible that a raccoon could have gotten inside their habitat and bitten the bear only a day or so earlier: there was no guarantee, no matter what the odds might have been, that the child was going to be safe without either the treatment or the confirmation that the bears weren’t rabid. The fact that the medical experts had to face was that the bears could have been rabid.

It was a tough decision for the health experts, no doubt. But this was the right decision — and really, the only decision — based on the situation they faced.

That doesn’t make it an easy decision, and I’m sure if we’d been witness to that meeting, we’d have quickly discovered that it was not the decision anyone was happy to make.

Doing what’s right isn’t always easy. Sometimes, it’s not even appreciated.