Tina Stikeleather’s dog has a very important talent.
The 44-year-old’s German Shepherd, Max, can detect when she’s going to have a seizure, to protect her from danger. Stikeleather, who has epilepsy, caught one such moment on TikTok.
She’d planned to record a routine training exercise with Max to show her TikTok followers, but instead recorded the minutes before her seizure. In the footage, Max tries to warn his dog mom by climbing onto the sink where she’s standing.
“When I told him to get down, he didn’t take my cue to get down. He went to the other side, got back up and then I was thinking, ‘OK, there’s something,'” she says.
“When I went to fall, he gets underneath of my arms to lower me down. He did that himself the first time he ever did that. I didn’t teach him that.”
On Red Alert
Max has the ability to not only detect when a seizure is coming, but to protect her from injury too. He’ll keep close by when his dog mom has a bath, and won’t be too far if she has a migraine or isn’t feeling well.
The clever canine has never received any professional service dog training, but has learned some basic commands to help communicate with and support Stikeleather.
“He watches so closely that he picks up on if I’m sitting and I start rubbing my head because my head’s really hurting or I bend over,” she explains, “He’s already up and over to me.”
Seizure Dogs
While there’s scope for more research into the role of dogs in healthcare, it might be that pooches can smell scents that humans can’t. We knew that a dog’s sense of smell is much greater than a human’s, so when there’s a change in the brain – for example, when a seizure is coming on – the body might emit an odor that we can’t smell. But dogs can.
Specially-trained seizure dogs can sense a seizure up to fifteen minutes before it happens, alerting family members or friends, protecting their person, and offering comfort at a difficult time.
