The well-respected VCA animal hospitals states on their website in an article written by no less than three veterinarians that motion sickness in cats is caused by anxiety and stress. This is wrong, I am afraid to say. Motion sickness or car sickness might be prompted by anxiety and stress or it might be exacerbated by anxiety but it is not caused by anxiety per se. That’s what they’ve got wrong in my view.
“Most motion sickness in cats is caused by the stress and anxiety associated with travel.” – VCA Animal Hospitals. This is misleading.
Motion sickness can be suffered by cats and dogs, as happens to people from time to time, and the reason is the same.
It is a disconnect between the motion that the individual is feeling, be they a dog, cat or a human, and what they see. A driver of a vehicle never gets motion sickness because they are looking out the window. They are focused on the outside world and they can therefore connect the motion that they are feeling with the motion of the vehicle against the background landscape. This allows the brain to understand what’s going on.
But a cat or dog in the front or back seat cannot ‘calibrate’ their brain in this way. They are simply feeling the movement which is transmitted to the brain via the balancing mechanism in the body’s vestibular system; a complex set of structures and neural pathways centrally located in the inner ear that regulate balance and physical orientation.
Perhaps a lot of people don’t realise – and I had forgotten – that cats and dogs can suffer from motion sickness in vehicles.
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This can only add to the discomfort that they feel when taken to a veterinarian. We know how bad it is taking a cat or dog to a vet. It’s very stressful for the caregiver and for the animal. Perhaps more so for the human!
And we can add motion sickness. I’m told that car sickness in dogs most often occurs in puppies because their inner ear structures aren’t fully developed. Many dogs outgrow the problem.
It would seem to me that a possible solution would be to ensure that a cat or dog can see the outside clearly. But this might be impractical. Pets should be restrained in vehicles to prevent them become projectiles if there is a collison.
Passengers in a car sitting in the back are more likely to get car sickness because they’ve got their head in a book or an iPad and they are not looking outside the window. The cure would seem to be to look out the window and calibrate the brain as I called it.
