I have a 15-month old Boxer named Riley. Two nights ago, he had what appeared to be a seizure while sleeping in his crate. Legs thrashing, foaming mouth, eyes rolled back in his head, disorientation, the works…lasted about two terrifying minutes.
I am going to take him to the vet here pronto, but my question is: does anyone else have any experience with this? What am I facing in terms of care and costs?
I did a little reading on the web and found out that Boxers may be one of the breeds that are prone to epilepsy, and the reasons given were pretty varied: high-breeding, contaminated food, lead poisoning, etc.
Any thoughts or comments are much appreciated. He’s a good, if slobbery and flatulent dog and I don’t want him to die, but since he is a dog and not a person, and my family is of limited means, we cannot afford for him to develop costly health issues.
If your dog has epilepsy he might be controlled by medication. Your vet can help rule out another cause, which may cost some $$, but the medication probably won’t be too terrible per month.
I read on the intertubes that if he indeed has epilepsy that it’s generally treated with phenobarbitol. I’d hate to have him on a drug that subdues his playful nature, which is part of the joy of owning the breed in the first place.
One of them had a thing for annoying cane toads, which resulted in a frothy mouthed very sick dog on occasion. But we never encountered an issue with seizures or anything through the 4 Boxers we had.
Sorry I can’t help with the problem. Boxers are a damn fine breed. Dumb as a box of rocks, but you gotta love em.
Riley shares your previous Boxers, ah, lack of mental quickness.
I swear that dog’s head is made of granite. He’s bashed it into stuff so many time where I thought “OW!!!” to myself, and yet there he is, wagging his nub of a tail and “woooing” at me, all wanting my attention.
I am seriously worried about his two seizures, though. He’s gotta go to the vet like yesterday.
Skipper, the brindle was 8 in 2007. One day we came home and he was having seizures pretty much as you described. Ginger, the other boxer in the picture, was a year older and had died about 6 months previous.
We took him to the vet and they put him on phenobarb. It controlled the seizures, but pretty much by completely sedating him. We would have to wake him up to take him outside for a walk, but he stayed in a haze the whole time. The phenobarb worked for about a month, then he started having seizures again. He started having them one after the other while we were getting ready to take him back to the vet. He died on my birthday (2007 was an exceptionally shitty year).
The vet did tell us that it can be controlled very well in many dogs, and especially in younger dogs. They have to build up a tolerance to the phenobarb and then they aren’t so groggy.
I’m very sorry and I hope Riley has better luck than Skipper did.
Wow, thank you and I am sorry for your pain with your dogs.
This dog is so playfull, great with my young sons (PATIENT and absorbing of multiple attacks to his body!) that this is the advice that I am loath to hear.
He’s had two seizures in about three months. The first one we explained away to ourselves due to his paw caught in the wiring of his crate while he was sleeping and we thought it was just a half-asleep freakout on his part. Especially since he stopped freaking out once I freed his fingernail from the crate’s metal wiring.
The other night, though, was completely random, and scary. He was yet again in his crate, though, and once again asleep. We only keep him in his crate at night and while we aren’t here because he is still close to puppyhood and can be a very destructive chewer…I’m pretty confident he’s housebroken now…
I feel guilty because maybe his crate restraint is somehow contrubuting to this. But we have no other way to keep this high-energy dog restrained and refraining from damaging our home while we sleep or are away.
I wonder if there’s any difference in the gene’s of the same breed between countries? As I mentioned my family had four Boxers at different times while I was growing up and I don’t recall any of them ever having a seizure.
Good luck with Riley FoieGrais, hope it turns out to be nothing serious and he can carry on as normal.
[Oh and any photos of the pup you’d care to link to would be happily ohhed and ahhed over by me. :)]
Thanks. I’ll set up some pics when I get home from work. He’s definetely cute, and on the bigger end in terms of weight…he’s about 75-80lbs of muscle mass that doesn’t know his own strength!
Funniest time we had with him so far: watching him drag my wife across the living room floor as she lay on her belly clutching Riley’s rope chew toy and him pulling her around like an oxcart!
Thanks, I’m hoping that it’s something we (and he) can just live with. I take him to the vet next week.
And with a dog like a Boxer, a big yard is a MUST. They are some of the most energetic dogs I have ever seen. Don’t let their appearance fool you…they are FAST and can really jump.
We have just over a half acre and we put in an invisible fence, so we can just let them out and they can run around and have fun (they…I have another dog, too, a mutt female named Macy).
I have a boxer, Jerry Lee, who is ten years old. I’ve had him since he was about ten weeks old. The only health problem he’s experienced is that he had a stroke about six months ago. He’s pretty much fully recovered now. He is getting old, sleeps a little more, moves a little more slowly. Other than that, no health problems.
And I disagree with the opinion that boxers are dumb - Mine is stubborn as all get out, but not dumb.
Me too. Mine were pretty bright. Skipper could open windows (if they were unlocked) and Ginger kept opening the refrigerator despite everything we did to stop her until we finally had to buy a new, side-by-side, fridge.
Ginger was also stubborn as hell. We invested about $300 in invisible fence wire and spent hours burying it. Ginger ignored it. Despite the shocks, she would walk (calmly, slowly, defiantly) across the border and then take off across the field. Once Skipper realized he was being left behind he would follow, only he would jump the line a lot quicker.
That’s funny and the complete opposite experience I have with Riley. He’s so damn terrified of that border that I cannot walk him. We have tried repeatedly to take off his fence collar, put a walking collar on him, and coax him into walking with us, but he refuses.
The last time I tried this I attempted to pick him up and carry him over the fence’s border to show him it was OK, and he proceeded to piss all over me in fear, and he leapt out of my arms and landed gasping on his side on the concrete driveway. Since then I’ve given up on trying to walk him. He just runs all willy-nilly in our big yard!
I had a Dogo Argentino with epilepsy. He died about a month ago (he was 7), but he had other problems as well (some autoimmune disease treated with Prednisone, which messed up his immune system even more). I think his medical problems had something to do with inbreeding.
He had the first seizure when he was about 2 years old, he was disoriented and aggressive afterwards and he bit my mother (she needed stitches). We put him on phenobarbital. His personality didn’t really change, he was friendly, playful, but unpredictable. He had 3 or 4 seizures while on phenobarbital (in 5 years). He always seemed lost (like he didn’t recognize anybody) and aggressive after the seizures.
The phenobarbital was really cheap - something like 50 cents for a month (here).
Seizures are common, but not as a cause of death. The most common cause of death is cancer.
I had a boxer that had simple partial seizures, and they were easily controlled by a minimal dose of phenobarbitol. Didn’t eliminate them completely, but kept a once-a-day occurance down to about once a month.
Seizures, even grand mals, are not dangerous unless they get hurt by external means (falling, or hitting something), or last longer than about 15 minutes. A run-of-the-mill grand mal seizure should last about five minutes (or less) from the start of the twitching to the end, and the postictal phase (basically, the reset) may take anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour before your dog is back to normal.
Have your vet screen your dog for a brain tumor, just to rule that out.
Well, yes and no. I tell people that I’m constantly amazed at how brilliantly smart AND amazingly stupid a boxer is, all at the same instant.
And stubborn. And mischevious.
ETA: to the poster who’s dog was aggressive after a seizure, that’s the postictal phase. Think of it as the brain rebooting. The dog has to reload his training during that period, and there’s sensory overload going on at the same time. Human eplieptics can be aggressive, too, for the same reasons.
We lost our Boxer at nine years old. Her seizures were very sporadic so we didn’t feel she should be constantly sedated. She was a wonderful loving dog and I miss her every day even through we have two new dogs. Exactly what her cause of death was I don’t know but she was pretty spry and healthy until she fell over dead last St. Patrick’s day.
