How to Treat a Pad Injury on a Dog

Video Transcript

"Let's talk about how to treat pad injuries in dogs. Now pad injuries are very very common because obviously these pads are hitting the surface of the ground and dogs like to run, play and some of our hard surfaces like concrete and asphalt can sometimes tear up these pads or there can be glass or things like that and they can cut their pad very easily and so the first thing to know with a pad injury is they can sometimes bleed quite a bit and so getting the bleeding stopped is our first priority. If you can, your first priority is to get your dog to a veterinary clinic so they can take care of that. Some of these pad injuries require sedation and suturing and bandaging. Some require just bandaging and skin gluing, it just depends. So your veterinary clinic can help you with that. Depending on where the cut is identify that, the best thing to do is going to be to put some sort of gauze pad or pad across it that will control the bleeding and then taking like a self adhesive wrap and gently without any constriction or any tightness at all just gently wrapping around that paw. What that will do is create a little bit of a compression bandage enough to stop bleeding so you can get to your veterinary clinic. If you are out in a remote area keeping a triple antibiotic with you or something like that is a good idea to coat into that wound first, then covering this. The biggest thing to know is making sure that these toes don't swell. If the toes are swelling your bandage is too tight and you need to loosen it."