Aid a Cat that has Been Hit by a Car

Video Transcript

" Hi this is Dr. Greg McDonald, and we are coming to you from Expert Village.com. We are talking about cats’ first aid today, and I want to talk to you a little bit about if your cat had been hit by a car, things that you can do to transport your cat to the veterinarian without getting hurt and also evaluating your cat to find out how badly they are injured. Cats do get hit by cars not infrequently. Again, we talked a little bit about trying to keep them inside to prevent that, but sometimes they do get hit. They almost always get hit at night because cats are a little bit like deer. When they see the headlights, they freeze instead of running away, and they can wind up getting themselves into trouble. One of the things if you just saw your cat get hit by a car, you want to immediately evaluate the damage that has been done. We talked earlier about cats often get hit in the face because they turn around look at the car just as they are getting hit, and so oftentimes we see some altered mental status from your cat because they don’t know where they are. They’ve been knocked unconscious, or part of the brain has been injured, and they don’t know what they are doing. One of the things that often happen when they are hit in the head is this brain trauma, and you can look at their eyes and see if their eyes are equal, and their pupils are equal, and that tells you if there is some altered status of the brain. Again, just getting hit in the eye or in face you can see some of these changes going on. It is always good to look at your cat when they are normal before they have a problem like this to try to see if you can tell things that are different and have a good data base to know what your cat looks like when they are not injured."