Over the past year or 2 my 5-yr-old goldendoodle has gone pretty much stone deaf. He responds to a loud percussive clap, but that is about it.
My question is, does he remember that he used to be able to hear? Is he aware that he is lacking a sense he used to have?
We’ve gotten used to using a lot more hand gestures, which he responds to. But I doubt that he “thinks” of those as a substitute for previous voice commands.
Yeah - I know - while we are at it, wha is it like to be a bat?
You want to know what dogs think?
Probably, Whens he gonna feed me.
Not this dummy. We’ve never had a dog that eats like this one. We knew our first dog had gone deaf when he did not come running to the sound of food being poured into his bowl. Another dog, we worked on ways to slow her eating, as she’d gulp it down, barf it up, and eat it again.
This guy, we’ll put food in his bowl, and it will sit there all day. Then when we go to bed, we’ll hear him go downstairs and eat. Unlike any dog I’ve had before.
Home runs hurt!
Data point suggesting he doesn’t know - he does not seem to “look around” as much as I would expect to make up for the lack of audio input. For example, I just went to the washroom. He followed me, but stood in the doorway, facing away from me. (Keeping me safe, I presume! 
) When I left the bathroom I brushed up against him, and he startled. I could imagine a “sentient” deaf being might intentionally position themself such that they would not be “surprised” by reasonably anticipated events.
For what it’s worth: I had a dog who went blind.
Right after she went blind, she ran full speed into a tree — as if she didn’t realize that she couldn’t see where she was going.
She didn’t do it again, though.
Because she was dead?
Your doggy don’t know.
That’s the thing about animals who lose a limb or a sense. They certainly are not emotional about it.
But….big but, my dog Bayliss came to me tail docked. I swear that dog mourns his tail loss. He looks longingly at his butt. Oh, wait….delete that.
No, your dog doesn’t realize he’s gone deaf. IMO
I’ve had a dog who became deaf, and a dog who became blind. Both of them were quite bright, as dogs go, and I never had the sense that either of them “knew” that they had lost the use of a sense which they previously had. They simply weren’t able to respond to stimuli via that sense anymore. We (their humans) adapted around them when we discovered that they had lost a sense.
Dogs have a very acute sense of smell. I think their hearing is pretty good, too, since they can hear at high frequencies (I might be wrong about that). But I always read that their sense of smell is what they use the most, and their vision is mostly b and w, and kind of just movements (or maybe that is what cats see). I had a friend with a blind dog, and he seemed to just navigate just fine, but he never left their 11 acre farm, and he just loved him a kitty friend. He would look for his kitty, if she wasn’t close by, and he sniffed everything until she was found. I witnessed that activity, and we tried to help him find her, but he was able to do it without much help from us.
Good grief, no. With the aid of insulin, she lived another couple of years.
She gave herself a pretty good knock on the head; but she wasn’t even knocked unconscious, let alone killed.
I’m half blind(literally, no eyeball on the left) I swear that side of my head doesn’t know it.
I see ghost images, peripherally out of that eye. It blinks in bright light. Even tho’ it doesn’t see it. (Yeah, I know its auto)
Now. I ain’t no genius, but if a higher intelligence can be fooled surely a dogs brain can be fooled, as well. Thinking it is seeing or hearing.
When my dog went blind - you would not have known it by most actions - its when you move the furniture and they start running into it that gives many owners the clue that something is wrong.
When we moved houses - there were lots of nose trails on the walls as she figured out where things were.
She was far more docile afterwards as well - the input was definitely ‘missing’, but she got along fine for another 8 years before dieing of entirely unrelated issues.
My poor Dixie doesn’t hear anymore (that I can tell), but she has taken to hand signals and flashing lights. Picked up on things pretty much instantly, but she’s a Dachshund, so I’m not surprised.
We had a cat that went deaf, and it was exactly this. Being deaf made her incredibly brave, because noise couldn’t scare her. The Roomba and vacuum were harmlessly silent. She’d sit there and let it bump into her and just give it that withering gaze that cats do.
I don’t think she realized she was deaf, just that in her old age she’d gone to live in a quiet and safe place.
It’s not uncommon for dogs to go blind in their old age. One of our dachshunds went blind (and eventually deaf, too), but he navigated by nose most of the time any way so it wasn’t a significant handicap. As mentioned, if we didn’t rearrange the furniture he did fine around the house.
Once he had an overnight stay at the vet’s, and when I went to pick him up, the doc had him walking by her side without a leash down the long corridor from the backroom. I said he’s blind, and she had never noticed. He did o.k., but he been to the vet lots of times, so it was almost home away from home.
Did she go blind due to diabetes?
I had a deaf cat for a while; and he had a huge advantage in feline arguments, because he could yowl just fine but he couldn’t hear a thing the other cat was saying. He acted as if they were too scared of him to talk back — and other cats acted as if they thought he was so totally confident in his ability to win any fight that he could afford to just ignore them. And most cat fights are won by the confidence level.
Yes. I didn’t realize what was wrong fast enough, and by the time I got her to the vet some of the damage had already been done.
I read that when dogs go deaf, they can get depressed because they think people aren’t talking to them anymore. Which is both plausible and also sounds like something completely made up.
Just to be safe, we get in our deaf dog’s face frequently to tell her how good she is.
Our dog who went deaf had been terrified of thunderstorms and fireworks. Once he couldn’t hear them anymore, it was a bit of a blessing.
Our blind dog lost her vision fairly young, due to glaucoma. We, too, didn’t re-arrange any furniture in those years, for that very reason.
The only time her eyesight ever caused her a problem was one incident, when she was walking down the stairway from our second floor (where our bedroom is, and where she slept) to the first floor. She normally would keep her body along the wall on one side, but on this once instance, she turned left too soon, and went plummeting off the stairs. Thank goodness, she was only bruised from the fall and the landing, and didn’t break anything, but she clearly learned a lesson there, and always kept close to the wall after that.