01/10/2026
Is your elderly pet starting to show cognitive decline?
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May you never ever experience these conditions in your dog; they are utterly heartbreaking, and making the right decision to say goodbye is confusing and full of internal conflict.
I understand the platform I have, and I promised some people I would talk about Little Man when I felt like I could because learning about this condition and what it looks like at different stages can help you make decisions, especially the final one.
Via my clients, I have only ever seen these conditions in very long-lived dogs, but it is totally possible to see them in older (but not oooooollld) dogs.
Hearing and eyesight start to decline in many older dogs, and this may come at about the same time that some cognitive decline starts, so it's hard to differentiate sometimes.
Any anxiety that is new, including storms, is commonly linked to cognitive decline in older dogs.
More advanced signs can be things like finding your dog standing in a corner because they've gotten lost in the house. You may also find them randomly standing in a room; that's disorientation. We ended up putting an Apple Tag on Little Man's collar so we could find him in the house/yard if he'd walked himself into a corner.
Sleeping in places they've not slept before; any change to normal behaviour could be cognitive decline, but these things may also be related to pain - for instance, if your dog normally sleeps on the couch but now doesn't, then that may be related to them being in pain and not wanting to jump.
Losing another family member, whether that be animal or human can be the catalyst for cognitive decline in older dogs - families often report an event was the start of it all.
Being restless at night or even stressed at night - this may be sundowner syndrome.
Toileting in the house when that never was an issue before.
Forgetting that they've been fed and looking for more food.
Change in activity, walking in circles, pacing, not settling.
Forgetting/not able to do things they could do before - Little Man stopped being able to walk backwards, coordinate his limbs well like he used to be able to in his fitness work, and no longer able to do scent work.
On our walks in the end, he stopped sniffing and being enriched by his walks, he simply followed our leg to keep track of us.
Know that friends and family, and even your vet, don't live with your dog and are not experiencing what you are, so if someone downplays what you're experiencing, don't accept that. A local Vet we don't use often looked at Little and said he looked great and was aware of his environment. I asked them what "bad" looked like, and they said just sitting there, not moving, and not aware of their surroundings - I would never allow my dog to be that so there's that.
Deciding to say goodbye. Little Man had been pacing for a long time, but I could put him on a bed, and he would settle - he just needed some direction.
In the end, he would not settle even if you picked him up and put him with us; he'd just jump off and start pacing again, and you could see he was stressed - this is when we decided that there was little quality of life for him like this - if he was awake, he was pacing. Yes, he still ate and enjoyed his food, but there is more to life than that, especially for a highly food-motivated dog.
The tumour in his foot that made him lame previously, which we had removed, was coming back and was painful for him - there was no point in removing it when we were talking about quality of life.
Orthopedic pain had now really kicked in, and medication wasn't doing much other than making him wobbly and groggy.
His swallowing disorder - a part of old age was getting worse; his coughing and gagging were getting worse.
His heart though....amazing....this dog was not going to just go to sleep and not wake up.
He didn't get Sundowners, but he did wake up around 5-6am and start pacing. He didn't start soiling in the house.
Our decision to say goodbye took looking at what his life was like and asking ourselves what quality he was experiencing - still having pretty good mobility and eating was irrelevant to the question we were asking. If I were a human experiencing what he was, I'd want to pull the plug - his last week wasn't horrendous, and I was happy about that. There was no bucket list, though; in that last week, my attempt at it caused him stress, and that really was just another form of validation of where his brain was at.
Little Man was put to sleep at home by an at-home euthanasia service called Rest Your Paws. Little was sedated; he ate lots of treats whilst we waited for that to kick in, and then we said our goodbyes before he was given the final medication that would stop his heart.
That day, my heart absolutely broke; I feel like I'm on the edge of crying anytime I talk about him or think about him - he was my adventure buddy, my absolutely solid dog that I could trust with anything....except eating cat poo and cooked bones on his walks. He was universe-sent, and it was such a privilege to be his human for 15 of his 17 years on this earth.
My advice to those experiencing cognitive decline is be well-researched on what it looks like and check in with yourself often about what quality of life the dog actually has because cognitive decline is different from other conditions where quality of life can be a lot easier to assess.
