What do you call a black Eskimo dog? But before that. Is your dog growling at
nothing? Like out of the blue the dog starts growling? Why is he doing it?
That's so odd. But it's a good question and the fact that you're here watching this video means
that there are more people that have that issue. So let's see what happens. Intro and let's begin.
Hi everyone. I'm Dr. Orion. A veterinarian and a veterinary behavior residency graduate.
So today's topic is growling dogs out of the blue. I'm not going to cover why your dog is growling
at you even if it is out of the blue I'm talking about growling at the air or at the wall or the
window or basically at nothing. We can separate it into two categories. One is behavioral and
the second one is medical. Let me start with the medical. Sometimes partial seizures might cause
the dog to start behaving in weird ways. One of those things can be growling, or even barking
at nothing. Another reason might actually be eye issues. You know those floaters in your eyes that
you sometimes see when you're staring at something white. Well, dogs can have them too. And in some
situations they might have a lot of them and they don't understand that it's something inside
of their eyes. So they're actually reacting to something that they're
actually seeing. But you know, seeing floaters inside of their eye. Any kinds of infections,
tumors, or anything that affects the central nervous system, hence the brain, might cause a dog
to behave weird so if it happens out of the blue and the dog was completely healthy before that,
you should definitely go to your veterinarian and start to have the dog evaluated for medical
issues. In the seam between behavioral and medical we actually have cognitive dysfunction syndrome.
Basically it's like Alzheimer's in dogs. It's not really just behavioral and it's not only medical
but if your dog is an old dog and starts showing those signs it might actually be related to that
as well. Now let's go and talk a little bit about behavioral reasons. One reason is that your dog
actually is reacting to something that his hearing or maybe seeing and you're not able to. Usually
it's something that your dog is hearing because you know, dogs can definitely hear better than us,
and have other frequencies that we might not be able to detect. Another thing your dog might be
reacting to is smell. Their noses are also better than ours so they can detect scents that we might
not detect at all or even pheromones from other dogs that are around your house, or you know,
maybe the air just, the wind carried it to your house. It might be an attention-seeking behavior
so your dog might have learned that when he does that behavior you're more likely to give
him attention. Like, "Fido. Why are you barking?" and you know he got his attention so he will do
it even more the next time that he can. And one last thing is actually compulsive disorder. Now
in people we call it obsessive compulsive disorder but we don't really know if they're obsessing over
it. We don't really know what they're thinking but we do see the presentation of the behavior.
We do see that they are doing something in a compulsive way so they are repeating it over and
over and over again. Sometimes it might be very severe and they will spend a lot of their time
doing that behavior. Sometimes if they do have this as a compulsive disorder they might
not respond completely to your attempts to distract them from doing it. And there are
also other ways to differentiate between cognitive dysfunction syndrome or compulsive disorder or
attention seeking behavior, but it's out of the scope for this very short video. If you do have
any concerns then you can always talk to your veterinarian or even to a veterinary
behavior specialist, to get to a full diagnosis and a treatment. If you still have any questions
feel free to write in the comments below and I'll be happy to do another video about that
specific topic. So what do you call a black Eskimo dog? A dusky husky.
Got it? Because it's dusk. Dusk, Dawn. Dawnie husky. That doesn't rhyme. See ya'.