Hello Everyone,
A few months ago we adopted a Bernese Mountain Dog from the local pound. He has become a very loved member of the family, but we have noticed something strange. He doesn’t appear to feel pain if any kind. To give you an example he forced his way through our back pasture fence. This fence has a few roes of barbed wire on it. Our other dogs have tried before to get through it, but always stopped as soon as the barbed wire started poking them. Not Alvin, he kept pushing through even when the barbs were digging into his skin. We had to go and get him to make him stop. Another time he had a large splinter in his paw. He want limping or doing anything that let us know he was in distress. We only noticed it when he was laying on his side. Pulling it out of his paw got zero reaction from him.There have been other times when he has done things that should have hurt him, but he doesn’t flinch.
I know that humans can have a condition that caused then to be unaffected by pain, but am wondering if dogs can too?
I’ve seen several dogs that obviously did feel pain not be smart enough to stop and get badly injured squeezing through sheet metal fencing. Dogs aren’t as smart as you give them credit for.
A few years back I noticed something on the back of our middle dog’s thigh. Taking a closer look, I realized that it was a three-inch-long gash in his skin, exposing the muscle. We don’t know how long he’d had it, or even where it came from.
Give him a good hard pinch between the toes. If he pulls his foot back, whines, growls, nips, or looks at you or moves his nose toward what you’re doing like, “why’d you do that?” He feels pain just fine. Being working farm dogs, Bernese may not demonstrate symptoms of pain the same way others might, needing to be stoic to protect their herd. Just a thought, anyway. Alvin is a great name, BTW.
My dog has hurt himself numerous times but it never stops him. He’s lost his front teeth by chewing on a metal doorknob or the fence. He has squeezed himself through the tiniest of holes under the fence (causing red scabbing all over his face and front legs) and torn paw pads so badly that they bled profusely, yet it didn’t stop him from running all over the house. We had to have the carpets in every room cleaned. Only later on in the day did he “notice” his injury and begin to lick it.
Conversely, he has a pretty good fake limp when he thinks he isn’t getting enough attention.
Dogs can be extremely stoic about pain and discomfort, which leads to and “justifies” abuse and neglect for some owners. Even conscientious dog people can be fooled for a time by a dog in pain, so it’s important to watch for unusual behavior that indicate a dog might be masking discomfort. They will even do things that are terribly painful, such as jump up on beds, chase balls, run and so forth because the desire to please their human trumps their pain.
I’ve never known a dog not to carry a foot if they get a thorn in it, and I have seen it a lot.
They call New Mexico the land of enchantment. “Enchantment” apparently has two little known definitions: 9)Fine reddish brown dust that penetrates everywhere. 10)Goat head stickers.
Yeah, dogs probably do not feel pain the way humans do, and even if they do, they don’t show it.
Growing up my parents had a Bichon Frise. A relatively small, “wimpy”, delicate-looking dog, although actually quite muscular and strong for his size under all the poofy white fur. He enjoyed riding on the dashboard of the minivan, and leaping across the car to the backseat in a single bound when he saw another dog outside.
At one point, the vet took x-rays of his hips as a preventive check against hip dysplasia. He told us that the dog had broken his hip clean through some time ago, and that it had healed properly because his muscles had kept the bone in place. We never had any idea, despite taking him for energetic walks every day. We assume it must have happened while he was bouncing around the car, somehow. But he never gave any sign of discomfort whatsoever.
Don’t forget 11) Not being able to buy anything that costs more than $20 without driving to Albuquerque.
Our prior dog got old and slowed down a lot, and she would yelp out if you accidentally stepped on her foot or tail. When she had cancer, she was stoic, but you could tell she was in a lot of discomfort - she had a hard time getting comfortable, and would roam the house at night looking for a comfortable spot. She eventually would just lie in the middle of the floor, and if one of us got up in the dark, there was a good possibility of stepping on her/tripping.
Our current dog seems to feel no pain. When I get home each day from work, I get the usual exuberant greeting, which usually involves his whole body wiggling and his baseball-bat tail banging against the walls, including cabinet corners - I think that has to hurt some, but nope. The greeting also usually involves one or two of his paws getting stepped-on in the excitement, but no yelp, no nothing. When I say “oh, sorry!” he looks at me as if he is saying “for what?”
When he was a pup, I took him for walk in a wooded area. I called him to come and he ran all out, jumped and landed full chest on a rock, bounced, and just kept on coming like he meant to do that. I know he had to be hurting, but did not faze him.
Why is that the linctus dogs are quite clear to tell when they are in discomfort*? Is it just knowing them, or are they being tortured in huge amounts we’re not aware of? Can’t really accept the latter. Or is it just cause all the ones I know best are small expressive dogs?
*Most recent example (when I was there) was eating a tub of butter.
I’ve seen the same dog express wildly different reactions to pain. Simone is an American Pit Bull Terrier. Despite their reputations as tough dogs who ignore pain, she can be surprisingly sensitive.
Once picked up her paw and acted horribly wounded during a walk; when I rushed her over to a streetlight, a single ant was pinching one of her toes. Yes, she was “beaten up” by an ant.
But when she had surgery to remove cysts from her scalp, resulting in three Frankenstein’s-Monster-esque rows of sutures on her head, she kept re-opening the wounds accidentally and never appeared the least bit disturbed. One time she simply turned to look at me and whacked her head into the doorjamb – as blood ran down her face she just calmly gave me the “Hey, Dad.” look.
If I had to guess what distinguishes the two reactions, I’d say pain she inflicts on herself accidentally doesn’t seem to faze her, but pain someone else has inflicted on her she takes very personally and is a theatrical wimp about.
Thanks for the replies. Maybe he’s just one though customer. Mainly I just worry about him getting really injured because he isn’t getting the “signals” that what he’s doing isn’t good for him. Or maybe he’s just dumber than a bucket of paint and he’s going to hurt himself no matter what.
I do have to say that I really love dog threads as I really enjoy hearing all of the dog stories. Dogs are such a big party of my family’s life. Even as I type this Gunner the Great Dane™ is sitting on my lap trying to help me type this reply. I can usually attribute most of my spelling errors to a combination of auto correct and Gunner. My OP in this thread is full of mistakes because before I got a chance to proof read Gunner used his nose to hit the post button. He can operate the touch tablet quite well! And for the record, Gunner definitely feels pain. He is Mr. Sympathy when he is even the least bit in discomfort. He really hams it up and tries to get all of the attention he can. He once scared the bejesus out of himself when he passed gas while he was sleeping. He required a good 30 minutes of “lap time” before he was okay. Nothing like a 130lb “lap dog” who craves attention!
The working dog theory mentioned above seems to hold true with my Catahoula. He’s come back from farm romps with huge gashes likely caused by barbed wire. Unless I see them or they get infected, he shows no sign of injury; he doesn’t even lick the wounds. He was kicked by a horse (which he richly deserved) and acted like it was no big deal-running around and chasing doves and wrestling with his sister. Nevertheless, I took him to the vet the next day just in case, and found he had several broken ribs and severe bruising.
But, he’s also a supreme actor. Tug on his gentle leader a bit when there are witnesses and he whimpers and cries like I’m murdering him. Same with nail clipping, but again, only if there are witnesses.
Maybe it is a stoic thing to protect the herd or perhaps there is an insensitivity to some types of pain bred into them.
They do feel pain…they just don’t express it as easy as we do. There is an exception though… the nape of the neck has very few nerve endings. I had a diabetic cat who got his shots there and he never even flinched …in fact he purred.
Cats will hide painful ailments like kidney failure…they just deal with it. Unfortunately by the time we catch on it’s too late to do anything.
I have one dog (and one son) who just seems to have a high threshhold of pain. I read somewhere that tests with humans show that some people have an even correlation between an increase in injury/negative stimulus* and an increase in pain and some don’t.
A normal person starts with mild discomfort and with additional stimulus the discomfort goes up evenly into intolerable pain. If you imagine a scale of pain from one to ten, you could chart a line with a steady slope.
Someone with a high threshhold will call it discomfort until they get up to the stimulus necessary for, say, an eight, at which point they stop calling it discomfort and have more or less the same reaction as a normal person. So their line has a much lower slope until there’s a sharp break upward, and then a continuation at the regular slope.
Dogs don’t talk, and even if they could, I wouldn’t trust their math. But I assume there are dogs with a similar large discomfort zone.
Pain studies typically use immersions of a forearm into near freezing water. The amount of pain increases predictably with the increase of immersion time with no lasting injury.
