Hope for improvement? Or else humane euthanasia

Seeking some insight after our vet said our next step for our dog should be a veterinary behaviorist or humane euthanasia. We have a huge decision ahead of us with this so trying to gather as much information as we can.

We have a female Newfoundland who is almost 5 years old. I’ll just call her Bella for the sake of being anonymous. She’s grey which we’ve been told could have something to do with her challenges as grey Newfoundlands tend to have health issues, but we didn’t realize that when we adopted her. The issue is that she has always had severe generalized anxiety since the day that we brought her home at 8 weeks old. For example: * She’s terrified of new buildings. She won't even go into some rooms in our house still if they're unfamiliar to her, and we’ve lived here a few years now. My husband often has to pick her up to get her to go to the vet or groomer for her nails. * Our poor girl seems like she's having a panic attack if we even walk past the car. In the car she’s so anxious I’ve been genuinely worried she’ll have a heart attack. * Very anxious for anything that's sort of out of the norm. This could be anything ranging from my husband or me carrying something, to a new noise, to a new object in the room. * Visibly uncomfortable sometimes if you even approach her to pet her with body language such as lick lipping and yawning •Teeth chattering, even at times where she’s usually excited like before a walk

When she’s especially anxious, such as in the car, vet, and getting her nails done, it’s a full on leg between her legs panic attack. She often freezes and cannot be coaxed out of it, she usually won't even take high reward treats when she's anxious. That being said, a good amount of the time when she’s at home she's content. She’ll come up to us when she wants love and seems like a generally happy dog. 

We've worked with her on these issues for years. We’ve worked with two trainers and her vet. She's been on 80mg of fluoxetine daily for almost a year and still generally very anxious. She’s also been on trazodone and gabapentin in the past at times but they didn’t seem to work and trazodone seems to make her even more skittish. We feel like we've been able to manage her anxiety to give her a pretty good quality of life at home. With that said, she’s still only comfortable in a few rooms of our house, on walks (as long as the route is familiar) and in our backyard.

Unfortunately, a little over a year ago Bella snapped at our other dog. She snapped and kept going for him even when he was yelping. Over the next couple of weeks while we watched them she tried to snap at him several more times so we ended up having to separate them completely for the safety of our other dog. Fortunately she didn’t draw blood or anything with the bite, but it was still very scary for us and our other dog.

We worked with a trainer for months but they still need to be completely separate as we cannot fully trust Bella around our other dog. This has been especially difficult since we still want to give them both quality time so that means that one of us is often with Bella and one of us needs to be upstairs with our other dog. 

Now to add on even more to that, we had a baby this past fall. During this phase with a new baby we've still had to navigate keeping the dogs completely apart in our house while managing Bella’s anxiety. This phase would be a lot easier if our dogs did not have to be kept separate since this now means that one of us has to be with our son and our other dog and the other has to be with Bella so that she's not alone all of the time. Bella has gotten somewhat used to having a baby in the house but she still gets visibly uncomfortable (lick lipping, yawning, whining) a lot, especially when he's crying. We do use gates in between them and everything so there a barrier. At this point, this has just been so much for us to manage. We're especially concerned about what this will all look like when our son is more mobile. We love both of our dogs dearly and want them to both have good lives. 

Our dogs do get walks, daily mental stimulation such as lickimats, kongs, or training/playing, and quality time with us every day. Usually each of them gets a walk every other day since they don’t go on walks together. They also get time in the big fenced in backyard.

With all this said, we’ve now been advised by her vet that the next step is either a veterinary behaviorist, or if that isn’t feasible for us or doesn’t work, humane euthanasia. Her vet said that she thinks she’s a significant bite risk to our family. She also said she cannot recommend rehoming her. Before we knew this, we had contacted our state’s Newfoundland rescue, but they said they wouldn’t be able to take her on either because of her extreme anxiety.

We’re trying to weigh if we can reasonably hope that she’ll get better if we keep trying and go the behaviorist route. It would be a significant commitment it sounds like time wise, financially, etc. Since her anxiety is so bad, we’re wondering if she might ever get to a place where she could be more at ease in life and we could trust her more around our other dog and our baby. It’s so hard because she does have moments of peace during the day if she’s in places she’s comfortable and if it’s relatively quiet in the house.

Thank you for your insights and taking the time to read this.