can a dog lose her mind?

“Is Pearl losing her mind?” asked Randy sheepishly, as if asking if a beloved relative had a drinking problem. “I don’t think so,” I said, laughing because the notion of a dog losing her mind struck me as improbable. Randy, our loving and gentle pet-sitter, was one of Pearl’s first visitors, sees her once a week, and has spent at least 10 days a year for the past three years with her when we’re away. In the last six months, Pearl had been hiding from him: the minute he walks in the door, he says, she runs up, wags hello, and then, in the same motion, runs upstairs and crawls (now laboriously because she’s full grown) under the bed, where she stays. To our immense chagrin, Randy reported that Pearl spent an entire week under the bed while we were at the beach last summer, emerging only to go outside and to eat.

If Randy is right, and 6 months is a marker, then Pearl became more fearful, more aggressive, and even less predictable at the time of her 3rd birthday. I certainly noticed that she nipped a guest when he reached for his shoes, that she was more fearful than ever on our walks, and that she continued, with Kosmo, to bark ferociously at anybody with the temerity to walk past the house. Did this mean she was losing her mind? Can a dog lose her mind?

Dogs are often diagnosed with forms of dementia as they age. We treat dogs in various ways for anxiety, obsessiveness behavior, and for other behaviors that seem to limit their capacity for enjoyment. But somehow the notion of losing a mind seemed a distinctly human construction, something we said—but perhaps less and less—to explain a set of circumstances that couldn’t possibly apply to a dog. Could they?

I might say, “I thought I was losing my mind” if, for example, I distinctly remembered putting my keys in my pocket, but when I reached for them, I found my pocket empty. Or perhaps someone says he knows me, but I don’t know him, could swear I’ve never seen him before. “Thank goodness I’m not losing my mind, “ says a colleague when he discovers that other people share his reading of a news event. So “losing our minds” these days is, as nearly as I can figure, a kind of Twilight Zone experience wherein our perceptions seem to have gone suddenly and inexplicably amok.

In this sense, then, Pearl’s perceptions of threats where there are none, fears of walking on Keswick past Oakdale (but not in the stretch before Oakdale), her recoil at someone taking off his shoes, her fierce determination to hold at bay anyone coming within twenty feet of her—all of these might resemble my sudden fear last night that all of those people mobbing the escalator were going to cause a fatal pile-up like the one that happened at Memorial Stadium in 1964.

So maybe dogs do lose their minds much as we do, temporarily if we’re lucky and without dire consequence now that we understand that losing our minds is not quite the same as losing our keys, now that our vocabularies are a little more discerning and a good deal more tedious. We all made it safely up the escalator last night, and I’m happy to report that since our new training regime, Pearl has rediscovered the pleasures of Randy’s company and the considerable advantages to Keswick in the blocks above Oakdale.