In all the years of our marriage (Notice I’m not saying exactly how many!!), we’ve had six dogs, one miniature dachshund and five Irish Setters.  I guess you could say that this is the long and the short of it!  We’ve been very fortunate that all but little Molly lived to their normal life span in a relatively healthy manner, with only the ails and discomforts of old age.  Molly, Irish Setter number 3 (IS#3) died on Christmas Eve, the day before her first birthday due to a congenital cardiac anomaly.  So it has been somewhat of a shock to have a dog who went blind due to the complications of diabetes, more on that insidious disease in an upcoming post.

Nothing makes me more angry than to see someone who abandons an old or ill pet, just at the time that pet needs you the most!  Getting a dog or any other pet is a sacred sort of bond of love and friendship between two different species.  This post is not about all the events leading up to the blindness; it is more focused upon the amazing strength and resilience of dogs.  After a lengthy and costly stay in doggie ICU, we came home with Mandy, IS #5.  She was 8 when she lost her sight.  We struggled with how she would cope and how we would cope.

Our house is on two levels.  To even go out to go potty, she was going to have to learn to manipulate a flight of stairs.  Whatever were we all going to do?  I’m the kind of person who copes best by reading up on a given situation and doing my research.  While I certainly would never say we have all the answers, we have come up with some helpful hints that might be helpful to you or to others who are faced with helping a blind pet to adjust and cope.

Here are a few suggestions and experiences that we found to be helpful:

Trust your other pet’s understanding.  I’m sure Caley didn’t understand exactly what was wrong, but she sure knew something was different with her “sister.”  We call them sisters even though they are actually four months apart in age and not that closely related.  In doggie genealogy, I think they are second cousins or something!  At the very beginning, Mandy was terrified of the deck stairs.  I can’t say I blamed her!  She froze at the top of the stairs and refused to move.  Caley ran up the steps, barked at her, and ran back down.  After several rounds of barking and running up and down the steps, she finally coaxed Mandy down the steps.

Since we have two dogs, we put a bell on the collar of the sighted girl, Caley.  Especially in the early days, that jangling little bell gave Mandy auditory clues to help her navigate around the house and the yard.  Now, two years later, we probably could do without the bell, but I think we’ve all gotten used to it.

The next big problem was her walking into everything.  I found a great product called Tracerz (with the “z.”  That was not a typo).  Tracerz are little packs of dime-sized stick on disks that you stick around everywhere.  There are ones to put on obstacles, like furniture; there are some to stick on the tops of steps, on door frames, on doors, and so on.  To me, they all smell the same, but to a dog’s far more discerning nose, each category of Tracerz has a different scent.  For the first few days at home, Mandy must have had one big, splitting headache from walking into everything, but she caught on so quickly and understood the different scents that it was nothing short of miraculous!     No more walking into the television stand!  Now, two years later, she knows her way around the house so well that we probably don’t need them anymore.

Be alert for new little behaviors and clues.  When Mandy needs to go out, she gets a tennis ball and carries it around to let us know.  We keep a good stash of oversized tennis balls upstairs and downstairs, but she is very picky about which one she wants.  You can’t just hand her one; she has to pick it out, and she always picks out the newest one with ease.  “I do it myself!”  They say that when we lose one sense, the other senses become more acute.  In her case, her hearing has most definitely become more acute.  She hears the coyotes yipping in the distance or the arrival of the FedEx truck long before her sighted sister.

Trust their ability to learn and grow.  In Mandy’s case her vocabulary has made a quantum leap!  She knows “step,” “step-step-step,” “turn,” “the other way,” “careful,” “watch out,” “keep going,” and the ever useful “bump.”  I think she would have learned “turn right” and “turn left’ without too much problem, but we weren’t consistent enough, so now we just tell her to turn.  If she is heading in the wrong direction, we simply tell her “the other way.”  She makes cute little right angle turns on command, sort of like a little soldier.  Recently I heard our grandson downstairs with her guiding her to the steps.  “Turn, turn,” he told her.  “Step, step.”  We had never talked to him about how to help her; he just observed us and did the same.

We have almost two acres of heavily wooded yard, and she manipulates the entire yard with ease.  Sometimes I think she has some sort of doggie sonar as she weaves in and out of the trees.  Trust me, she also finds the pantry without any problem to woof for treats!  Every once in a while, she does get herself a bit confused about where she is, but she stands still and give a very distinctive bark.  “Come find me!  I need help!”

Do I miss those cute little black eyes?  Of course, but she is still our sweet little girl, she still has all the same facial expressions, and she still loves her walks with you.  I have to wonder if she understands what has happened to her, but she certainly seems to be a happy little one—if you can call a 105-pound dog a little one!  If you are wondering where the title for this blog came from, when Mandy first lost her sight, I found a great sweatshirt online with “Blind Dogs See with Their Hearts” on it.

©The Eclectic Grandma, 2016