Can old cats (or dogs I guess) suffer from dementia?
I have a 15 year old cat, Smokie. She’s gone deaf. : ( And in the last month or so she’s taking to going upstairs and yowling. It’s the sound a Tom makes when they’re in heat, or the sound a mother cat makes when she’s calling her babies. Smokes had one litter many moons ago, then I got her spayed. Rick went up there once when she was doing it, and she was sitting on a couch that I’d had all of her life, until we bought new ones three years ago. She was sitting there, facing the back of the couch and just yowling.
Well, some of you may remember that I had another cat, Emo, who we’d had for about three years who was run over by a car and died. Smokey and Emo were far from being friends. Smokey doesn’t like ANYBODY but Rick and me, but Smokes started this yowling thing about a week after Emo died. And that’s another thing. Her personality is changing too. She’s becoming much more friendly with people, even strangers, and that is NOT like her…..any thoughts?
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Yes, I’ve definitely heard that they can.
We had a sheltie that lived to 17, but sank into dementia at the end. She would stand in a corner barking for hours at a time, pace and whine all night, and was completely incontinent. She was also deaf and mostly blind with cataracts. She looked perpetually confused. She eventually started having seizures, which made the decision to euthanize her easier.
We have an elderly dog (14) who has dementia as well right now. She’s clearly confused and even getting a bit more “snappish”.
She forgets which door has the doggie door—and occasionally comes to other exterior doors to be let in..she barks at people she used to recognize and greet with a wagging tail. We think she’s a bit vision/hearing impaired as well.
The oddest sign we’ve noticed so far is that she can’t seem to bear the sound of my hubby or I coughing.
So, when we snuggle into bed at night with the dogs in their dog beds in our bedroom if one of us coughs Callie (the elderly dog) gets up and nervously paces and cannot settle down again.
We are forced to let her out of the room to sleep in the hall instead.
I don’t understand why the sound of our coughing has suddenly become a big deal to her—but we’re sure that’s what it is that’s getting her riled up.
@geeky_mama Awwww…. : (. The strange thing with Smokey, like I said, is she’s getting friendlier….
It sounds a lot like Smokey’s deafness and her missing Emo is what’s making her yowl like that. Whether they were friends or not, she’s used to having another kitty around, and it’ll take some time for her to adjust. My family cat lived to be almost 21, and she was deaf and blind in the last year or so. She’d yowl a lot too – we thought she was just confused and the fact that she couldn’t hear herself didn’t help the matter. I moved out of my parents’ house about a year before she died, so she spent a lot of her time looking around for me.
It does seem strange that Smokey would be getting friendlier, but maybe she’s just forgotten that she’s “supposed to” dislike people. That part can’t be a bad thing!
LOL! @Seelix the first night that Rick stayed with me, IN my bed, he woke up in the middle of the night to Smokes sitting on his chest, staring at him with her BIG green eyes. He said they just looked huge. He reached up to pet her saying, “Well hi Smokes”! and WACK!!! She slapped him right across the face! LOL! She wasn’t used to seeing strange men in our bed! : )
@Dutchess_III – I love that! It’s a wonder he didn’t run right then!
I don’t know about dementia but I do know several of our cats over the years have become more friendly and engaging once they were “the only cat”. Your old cat might be having a time of realizing Emo’s not coming back, irritating as you think he was to her maybe it’s just his felineness/someone to talk to she misses?
:(
He really, REALLY loves animals!
@Neizvestnaya Well, she was an only cat for seven years, and she was a GROUCH! It got worse when we started bring other animals in….I’m feeling so sad.
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