I would hesitate to generalise and link 'rage' with epilepsy. I think this is a misconception by ill informed people.
Having a personal interest in this subject and researched it on behalf of a family member, I believe that only a minority of people with temporal lobe epilepsy experience episodes of abnormal aggression.
I have witnessed epilepsy in several people and dogs (including one of my own) and have never seen any aggression.
I had never heard this before. Barney has epilepsy but has never shown any signs of aggression at all. He did bite my son during his first ever seizure (he was 6 months old) but it was not a bad bite and my teenage son didn't realise he was having a seizure and went to see what was wrong with him. He is never even the slightest bit aggressive coming out of a seizure although he is frightened and confused.
It is not at all to imply that dogs that have epilepsy have rage, or even any aggression problems, nor will they develop it as a consequence of their epilepsy.
What I was trying to say, (badly, I'm afraid
) is that in
my own observations, having witnessed Springer Spaniels in a true rage "avalanche" is that it
appears to be
like a seizure, in that the dogs did not appear to be at all conscious of what they were doing, both during and after the episode, and appeared dazed in a similar manner to a seizure afterwards. There is some research that rage
may originate in the temporal lobe, which is also where seizures originate.
The term "rage" gets thrown around quite easily with dogs with behaviour and aggression problems, and my point was that rage is an alltogether different thing entirely, with certain benchmarks that separate it from "dogs behaving badly", and has an organic cause.
I did not mean to alarm anyone who owns a dog with seizures. The two, rage and seizures
do not go hand in hand, and I would not worry about an epileptic dog developing rage at all. Sorry for any misunderstandings
