I recently had a thread in MPSIMS about my dog, Polaris, being timid. I finally realized why that may be tonight: I think she’s a canine Mr. Magoo.
Today, I took her with me in the car when I needed to go to a drive-through. My husband was out working in the yard, and when she saw him, she started barking, and backing away in her fear-crouch. He was only five feet away. “Hey, it’s just Daddy!” I said, and went on, oblivious as usual.
This evening, my husband was tossing treats to the older dog, who deftly leapt into the air to catch them. He tossed one to Polaris, and she just sat there, blinking when it bonked her on the nose. Thinking she didn’t understand what he was trying to teach her, he tried a few more times. She willingly leaps into the air to catch her ball-- what was the problem? Then it dawned on us: she couldn’t see them!
Things started clicking into place. We had wondered why, a month ago, when we picked her up from the kennel, she didn’t come to us when they let her out of the cage. We called, and she just stood there, looking around like she was confused. Finally when she got about three feet from us, she began leaping and wiggling with joy. At first, we thought it was because she was just startled by the noise of all the barking dogs (who start a chorus every time they hear the front door open) but now I think it may have been that she couldn’t see us, and our calling voices were echoing off the cement walls-- she didn’t know where we were, though we stood less than twenty feet from her.
Even earlier than that, we had laughed at her when she barked at my husband after he put on a hat. We thought she was just afraid of the hat, or doing one of those relatively harmless goofy-dog-things-which-defy-explanation. Now, I’m wondering if it was because she fuzzily recognizes our general outlines by sight, and relies more closely on voice and scent, and when my husband stood back from her wearing a hat-- something she’d never seen before-- he became unrecognizable.
I don’t think I’ll ever make it as a detective-- I can’t believe I didn’t put all of this together before now.
She can see close-up. I trained her using hand signals along with voice commands. If she’s at my feet, she’ll obey the hand signals, and she can see if a toy is properly buried in her blanke, so I know her whole vision is not poor.
The point of all of this is: would my vet be able to test her for this? I realize that there’s nothing that could be done: I’m willing to lay money that she wouldn’t wear glasses, and I’m not going to put her through surgery for something that’s not a life-threating issue. (Meaning, she doesn’t seem to be *suffering *from not being able to see, just more skittish.) It’s just that it would be nice to know if we could confirm near-sightedness so I’d know for sure if that’s the cause of her timidity.