Do my animals know they are missing body parts?
So, it's basically the title but to add a bit of info, I have 2 animals missing body parts. Both are rescues, both were missing the parts before they were making memories. Neither reason is known by the rescue we got them from. (They were a package deal because they got super close in recovery.)
1 is a cat who had a severe infection in his eye, causing it to protrude from his head, resulting in removal of the eye and sealing of the socket.
The other is a dog that had multiple breaks in his jaw and necrotic tissue in the break, causing it to be unable to be repaired, resulting in the removal of about 50% of the lower jaw.
Again, both of these happened before memories were forming. Do these animals recognize that they can't see/bite correctly? Do they understand that they are missing pieces? Does my cat know he lacks depth perception? Does my dog know he has a hard time picking things up for a reason?
They both live great lives and you'd almost never know they have these issues. The cat has learned to check distances and not trust what he sees, the dog is great at doing everything except picking up things that lay flat on the ground. There are no real long term issues, I am just genuinely curious if they understand that something is missing or if because it happened when they were so young they think they are completely normal.