Symptoms to Watch for in Your Dog: Drunken Gait, Ataxia

When a person walks around like they were drunk, most of the time they are. Dogs, typically, are not drunkards, even though the odd numbnut human might get the bright idea of getting their dog drink some beer to see what happens.

If your dog stumbles around as if he were drunk, he's not likely to sleep it off.

I have experienced uncoordinated, unbalanced gait with my dogs four too many times. The first time, it was after Jasmine's severe drug-induced hyperthermia.

Jasmine could barely stand at all, and when she did walk she was stumbling and falling all over. The high body temperature "fried" her platelets, her muscles, and her liver. She was in terrible shape and ended up in a veterinary ICU for a week. It took a whole month for her to get back to normal. Our biggest frustration at the time was convincing the vets in charge that her inability to walk had nothing to do with her recent knee surgeries.

The second time Jasmine had severe deficits in the ability to walk, was with her neck disc injury. In some ways, it looked similar, in some ways it did not. No idea how that happened either. She was fine one day, and she wasn't the next not having done anything in between.

The last time it isn't clear what really happened; it was a bunch of problems combined into a terminal situation.

JD's ataxia [the official word for unsteadiness when walking that is caused by a neurologic problem] started subtly in the morning. He returned from a walk before it was over and looked as if he had a bit of a hard time with his hind end. At first, we thought it was possibly a side effect of his meds. The veterinarians agreed. It should have resolved within 24 hours, but instead, things had gone downhill quickly. The hypothesis was an infection or a tumor in the brain, somewhere right behind his eye. We decided not to put him through the process of trying to diagnose something which likely wasn't going to be treatable.

Cookie had a couple of episodes of what looked like partial paralysis of some sort. That, out of all things, turned out being iliopsoas injury.

A common cause of drunken gait is vestibular disease.

This also likely looks the most like a drunken sailor type a walking. The onset is sudden and usually comes with a head tilt and jerky eye movements. Similar symptoms can also be caused by an inner ear infection, trauma, tumors, and certain medications. Or it can just happen for no reason anybody can figure out, idiopathic.



Ataxia caused by vestibular disease is due to a disturbance in the balance center, such as when you spin really fast and fall over when you stop as if your brain doesn't know which way is up or down. The vestibular system is composed of parts of the brain and inner ear, so disturbances to either of those places can lead to ataxia.

The failure of the unconscious body awareness, proprioception.

This is a result of poor information flow between the limbs and the brain, most commonly caused by an intervertebral disc issue, tumor, infection, immune-mediated, or other problem affecting the spinal cord. If the communication lines break down, the limbs are willing to listen but incomplete instructions are getting through.

The problem can lie in the brain itself.

If the command center itself is compromised, the body cannot do its job without the essential guidance. This again can be the work of inflammation, infection, tumor, degenerative changes or structural abnormalities.

Systemic and metabolic issues such as anemia, electrolyte disturbances, and toxic exposures can result in ataxia.

Low blood sugar, low potassium, or anemia, for example, can impair brain function as well the ability of the muscles to execute any commands they might receive. Exposure to toxins and adverse reactions to medications can have similar effects.

Except for vestibular disease, our dogs managed to cover all of these.

As you can see, the potential reasons behind your dog's incoordination can be many, often serious.

The problem may lie in the brain, inner ear, spinal cord, or elsewhere in the body and the cause can be trauma, inflammatory, degenerative, infectious, autoimmune, vascular, metabolic, cancerous or toxic in origin.

Accompanying symptoms may vary but unless your dog has already been diagnosed with an idiopathic vestibular syndrome, see a vet asap.


Further reading:
Loss of Balance (Unbalanced Gait) in Dogs
Ataxia in Dogs
Vestibular Disease in Dogs

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Learn how to see and how to think about changes in your dog’s appearance, habits, and behavior. Some signs that might not trigger your concern can be important indicators that your dog needs to see a veterinarian right away. Other symptoms, while hard to miss, such as diarrhea, vomiting, or limping, are easy to spot but can have a laundry list of potential causes, some of them serious or even life-threatening. 

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