Life with a Blind Dog–How Come She’s Always Hungry?

My dog Suzie is blind.

It seemed to come on quickly. From the time I first questioned whether she might be having a seeing problem to her diagnosis–two days.

But in hindsight, it crept up and fooled us for a good three months before the dog opthamologist (who would have guessed we have two in Sonoma County?) pronounced her stone-cold blind.

How could I not have suspected? Why didn’t I realize I was a seeing-eye person? I’d only been walking the dog routinely for nine years. How could she maneuver around things so efficiently if she couldn’t see?

I’ll never know. But as soon as she was diagnosed it was all downhill and suddenly she couldn’t even find her food dish without spilling the water and stumbling over her feet.

Though that did explain in part why she had gotten so fat–she couldn’t run confidently so she didn’t. The vet and I had discussed and tested her for her weight gain (15 pounds on a 39 pound dog over four months?) but somehow neither one of us realized she couldn’t see until she walked into the wall instead of stepping through the sliding glass door. We think the blindness was caused by Cushing’s Syndrome.

“As long as you don’t mind owning a fat blind dog, she doesn’t care,” my niece, another veterinarian, explained. “A dog’s principal sense is smell and then hearing. Seeing is the third most important sense, so just love her and take care of her and she should be perfectly happy.”

Gordon Setters are notorious actors and they know how to exploit their owner’s emotions, so while I’m sympathetic to her plight, I can’t become a push-over either. Even while she insists she is starving to death and mopes around her food dish, I must remain firm. One cup of food in the morning, one in the evening. That’s it. Even if she is blind.

Cushings affects her appetite; it seems to be affecting her more than the blindness. She’s become a ravenous scarfer.

She wants more. She thinks she deserves more. She doesn’t understand why we won’t feed her more often. After all, she’s handicapped isn’t she? Don’t I feel sorry for her? She keeps close track of the clock (how?) and knows when it’s dinner time.

And if I don’t get with the program, she sneaks down the hall and eats the cat food. Or finds her way to the cat litter and eats worse.

This all from a dog who rarely got around to finishing her food in one day the first nine years we owned her; who didn’t care if other dogs came to visit and ate her kibble.

Suddenly, we can’t leave anything on the counter–weren’t those chocolate chip cookies for her? One day she climbed on the kitchen table and ate my tuna sandwich while my back was turned. What’s that all about?

And I’m not going to tell you what happened when we spread chicken manure on the flower beds . . .

Her sense of smell drives her. That’s where her pleasures lie these days. But the more she eats, the more she gains, the more ungainly she becomes. The stairs have become difficult and I have to lift her into the car when we go for a ride.

The object lesson for me is clear–a handicap in one area does not excuse poor behavior in another. Just because something bad happens to me, for example, doesn’t mean I can lose my temper when I’m crossed by someone else. Or, just because I’ve had a hard day, doesn’t mean I can eat all the chocolate chip cookies.

I’m watching Suzie closely. Not just to take care of her needs, but to find out what else I need to know about living with my wants.