Advice wanted on how to help my sad old girl
Hey everyone! I'll start this by saying that this will be a long post and also might be a bit of a sad post, and I apologise if this reminds anyone of their previous pets.
I used to have two dogs, a girl and a boy, but now it's just the girl. He lived what I hope he would consider to be a happy life, but somewhat recently we had to put him down last september due to health issues. So obviously we are all still grieving,.
My family and I have recently started to notice that our old girl (she is 12 turning 13 this year) has started to slow down a little, she hasn't fully stopped eating but she is eating much less than she used to. Usually she is quite social and will start crawling onto everyones laps given the chance, but she has been keeping to herself which is quite odd.
To put this in perspective, even though she is old, you would never guess it by the way she acts. She is still full of energy and has never stopped acting like a puppy, she also still has the coordination of a puppy which is a little entertaining at times. We will often have full 'conversations' with eachother because she has always been a very vocal dog. But because she has gotten older she has naturally slowed down a little, but she still has her spark.
She's also a very anxious dog and has been on anxiety medication for about ten years due to her previous owners. I won't say too much about her previous owners, but she does have brain damage and when we first adopted her she was in awful shape.
Due to our boy passing away recently, the people in our house have slowed down a bit for obvious reasons. We have dog beds all around the house to make her (and our boy when he was still around) comfy, but she was alway choosing our couch. After afew days of our boy not coming home, our girl started to isolate herself. She would move away from us and go to a dog bed on the ground, she'd eat less, and she'd cry/whine a little.
We used to not let our dogs upstairs because we have carpet upstairs and our boy was very messy (he almost dug a whole tree out of the ground, he was very proud of it lol), and we didn't want our carpet getting ruined. But now that it's just our girl and she's much cleaner, we let her upstairs. Because of her loneliness, every room upstairs (except for the bathrooms) have dog beds, and at night I will always allow her to sleep in my bed with me if she wants. But recently, again, she has been keeping to herself.
My family's schedule is usually open enough for all of us to have our quality time with our dog, but two of us have school/university so time can be limited. When our boy passed, I didn't want to deal with my emotions, so I focused on our dog. I would take her on walks everyday, I started to try and teach her how to play, and she was seeming happier. But then my emtions caught up with me and I slowed down.
I will admit that we have not been taking her on walks as much as we should, and this is definetly affecting our dog. I have been reseaching things similar to "how to help my senior dog when she is sad", and many article mention treats, but our old girl has a very delicate stomach and will stop eating for days if she eats the wrong thing. The current food she is eating, we have been feeding it to her for around a year or two and has had no negative reactions to it. Another thing articles suggest is playing with dog toys, but thing about my dog is that she isn't the brightest and she has never learnt how to play. To be fair, our boy was a whippet cross working dog, so when we tried to play with our girl, he would just end up trying to herd her. But I still have been trying to teach her to play.
We have suggested to eachother that maybe she could just be sad because she's lonely, so we have started looking for a new baby to rescue ('baby' meaning any age, I still call my old girl a baby lol). We are also a rescue animal only household for our own moral reasons. I'm not sure what to do exactly, I just really want to see her tail wag and watch her run up and down that hall with that crazy excitement puppies usually do.
Sorry if it felt like I rambled a bit with this, I'm just worried about her. I'd be happy to hear any suggestions!! Also sorry if some of this doesn't fully make sense, I'm trying to make sure that I don't share anything too personal here.