In some situations, it's good care and hygiene, but there's a good number of eye diseases that have nothing to do with cleaning and with what you're doing. Many dogs out there don't need routine cleaning. They have big, regular-shaped faces. Their eyelids work correctly and they don't have a lot of hair on their face. With some dog breeds, you never even have to clean their eyes, technically. But there are some cases where you want to make sure that their hair's not getting in their face and they're not collecting a bunch of matter there that's causing irritation. Specific grooming is important, but thinking that if you clean your dog's eyes, it's not going to have any eye problems is not a realistic expectation.

Cleaning could help avoid some but not all problems. But if they have a lot of hair near their eyes and it gets gooped up, it can cause issues and infections. So get the hair trimmed in that area, or take one of those little cones and brush it free.

You'd be shocked that your dog is losing or has lost its vision. Unless it happened really quickly and it was both eyes at the same time, your dog can adjust to so many things. I used to work at a place where they had a blind cat and nobody knew the cat was blind. The cat had adjusted and knew where everything was. It could sense other things around it. So if your dog suddenly loses vision, it may bump into things. If it didn't happen suddenly, or it still has a good eye, it's still going to navigate well. So if something seems weird or off, if they seem to shy away or get startled coming around the corner, those could be some signs.

Different diseases can cause blindness. High blood pressure, kidney disease, thyroid disease, and such things can affect the eyes in ways that can create other symptoms.

I had a blind Cocker spaniel and if you didn't know him, you wouldn't know he was blind unless you moved the furniture a bit. And even then, they get a sense as they're moving, they can feel its presence on a different level. They can sense things. I think we've spent a lot of time moaning and groaning about why we can't see as well, and they just adjust. They have to adjust to survive.

It depends on what you call a test. Fingers in front of their face, making sure they blink appropriately, dropping a cotton ball, and having them track you without making noises are usually the things we do for vision tests. If they're really scared, all bets are off. They sort of stare at you blankly with their eyes open. You're like, "I think you can see me." It's some crude stuff, almost caveman-style testing to see if they can see or if they blink when something is coming toward them. Those are some common things we do.

Yes and no. If you're looking through your cabinet for things to give your dog, the answer is no. But many medications that we dispense are human drops. They're on the human line of things, so it's not weird that we're using human drops for dogs. But if you don't know what you're treating, there are way too many things to choose from. I do not recommend grabbing Visine or something like that. That's never a recommendation for treating a dog's red eye or whatever it may be. In general, I'd say don't use anything. However, I will say this, one of the potentially safer things to do if you were trying to get an appointment and just wanted to flush your dog's eye out, would be to use plain sterile Saline. Saline only, not contact solution, not Visine. You can run it across the eye to flush it out.

You do want to make sure, though, because if you use something like an old eye medicine, it may have cortisone in it, and you don't want to use those until you know what's going on with that eye. If there's a scratch, you can make it worse, or conversely it won't do anything. The best is to wait and not medicate until your vet has had a chance to look at the dog's eye.

Some people will say, "Well, he's had this before.", but there's a big difference between a red-eye two years ago and a red-eye today. There can be some subtleties where that one was just inflammation and allergies, and this one is a scratch. Steroids on a scratch are not okay and will make it worse.