Hi this is a question for my mother in law. She has 3 jack russells 6 and 5, the 2 younger ones are brothers. Apparently they keep doing funny things. They raise up on their back legs, their paw comes up slowly (one paw) and then they start what she says looks like fitting. The first time this happened was when her husband had a stroke and the dogs were with him all night on the floor biting and licking his ears lol (she found him 6 hours later!) She took them to the vets and there was no obvious cause so the vet said to keep calm around the dogs as they obviously felt the upset. They have been doin it on and off a few times. My mother in laws father died last week and they started doing it again, she insists she has been calm around the dogs and not being upset around them. It seems funny they do it when something happens??!! Can anyone explain this odd behaviour as shes worried sick as the vet cant see anything and has suggested more etensive tests, which she is not too keen on.

Thanks guys x

It could very well be a form of epilepsy and it could be triggered by stress. There are no tests a vet can do to prove epilepsy unfortunately, the best bet is for the owner to try to film the dogs when it happens (such as if they have a video facility on their mobile or on their digital camera) and show that to the vet. Most epileptic dogs are perfectly normal the rest of the time and then a vet won't be able to find anything wrong. Blood tests and similar will be normal too.

Just a thought, I had a GSD puppy that had fits, the first fit upset my older GSD very much, He shook and whined and wanted to hide.  When I asked an old tyme vet his opinion he said it was that the older boy was picking up on the puppies electric field. Up to that point (he was 2) he was not afraid of gun shot or fireworks, after this incident he is now terrified of these noises, he is now 11.  The young puppy had the first fit after her second injection, this was a saturday morning, by Monday Morning she was blind, deaf and completly incontinent, it was a weekend from hell, She was put to sleep on the MOnday, screaming her head off, as she had been doing for over an hour.  So it was not just a fit it was a catastrophic brain surge type thing, I was too upset to let them do a post mortem, I also knew the fits were caused by the injection, but of course the vets wouldn't here of it.  Sorry gone off track a bit, but as dogs are used to detect cancers and such who knows what they can do.  ON the basis of the above, I would think your dogs were picking up on the brain activity of the patients, causing them to react out of character, but would not think they were having fits themselves, sounds much more like severe stress and of course this will bounce around them all making each worse.  Just a thought

Now thats a funny thing you should say there as my father in law is currently undergoing tests for lung cancer!! I do personally think it may be a behaviour issue rather than a health one as other than that they are a healthy and crazy pair of dogs lol but thanks for the replies guys i will relay them onto the mother in law.

Tasha x