Our pets are living longer and are healthier than ever, thanks to advances in nutrition and medical care. As animals age, behaviors that are hard to interpret mainfest. It can be difficult to determine if your geriatric pet is ill or just exhibiting some unusual age-related behavior.
Aloofness, panting and whining are common geriatric behaviors. They might also indicate your pet has arthritis. Observe your pet when it first awakens. Does it readily move around or seem stiff at first? During a walk outside, does your dog go slower or not as far? When it returns home, does it lie down immediately?
Arthritis can been successfully treated with many different modalities at the veterinary clinic. Please visit our Arthritis page in the Diseases section to learn much more about this important and overlooked problem.
An older pet that takes longer to eat or doesn’t eat as much is not uncommon. Their caloric needs are less, and their sense of smell is diminished, which leads to a decrease in appetite. This also could be a sign of a mouth or tooth problem or anemia, cancer, inflammatory diseases, worms or internal-organ failure.
This cat was given a transfusion after an examination revealed a blood disease.
A pet that drinks more than usual can be a behavior that at first seems good. What can be wrong with an older dog or cat that hydrates frequently? But what can seem like a good behavior can actually be a symptom of a serious problem with the internal organs. What is important here is to observe your pet’s drinking habits closely and look for a change in these habits. A good way to do this is to measure how much water you put in its bowl to drink. If the amount you put into the water bowl is increasing, this could be a sign of disease.
Also observe urination habits closely because changes here can be subtle. Older pets may have occasional accidents in the house as they age. This also could be a sign of many different internal problems. Urinating small amounts frequently, blood-tinged urine, and licking at genitals are important signs of diseases and are easily missed. The same thing applies to defecation habits.
This X-ray is that of a dog whose owner thought that he might have had intestinal blockage. It turned out that the pooch had ingested pennies.
Visual acuity is another area to pay more attention to. Observe if your pet seems tentative when taking a first step up or down stairs. Move the furniture in your house, and see how well it navigates. Take your dog outside when it is dark and see how it navigates the sidewalks and grass. Problems here could be a sign of a normal age-related loss of vision due to cataracts. It might also be a sign of glaucoma or an ocular tumor.
Some age-related behavior changes are treatable. One of the more common ones is cognitive dysfunction syndrome, which is akin to human senility. There are medications and foods that are helpful in minimizing these symptoms.
The Diseases section of our web site at has a geriatric page that goes into much more detail on age-related problems.