What can I do to help prepare my dog for when she goes blind?
My 6 year-old dog, Zelda, has just been diagnosed with glaucoma. She's now blind in one eye, and the ophthalmologist has told us it's just a matter of time until she loses vision in the other eye as well. We're giving her treatment to try to forestall it, and it could very well be years before she loses her sight, but we've been told to work under the assumption that it will happen.
What can we do, now, to help make the transition to blindness the easiest for her?
The ophthalmologist told us to work on certain verbal cues ("stair-up" and "stair-down"), which will help her navigate the world later on. Are there other really useful verbal commands we should work on now? Are there ways we can change how we play with her, so it'll be easy for her to figure out how to play once she's blind? Any other sorts of things that, now, would make things better for her, later? |