Weekend Dog Blog #5: Blooood!

Thursday evening, I was busily typing my post about the lesbian pregancy books when Shrike got home from work. I shouted from the office that "I'll be there in a minute," as she went to greet the dogs, who were outside.

A moment later, she came into the office and asked, "Did he bite you!?"

"No, why?"

"There's blood in the floor."

"What?!?"

Sure, enough, there were a few drops of fresh blood in the floor, near the door between the kitchen and the dogs' room sunroom.

BigGaloot was, of course, bouncing off the walls, greeting Shrike, and PerfectPup was still outside.

(She used to come running if I even whispered the words "Mom's home," but since BigGaloot came along, she waits for him to settle down a bit before she bothers coming in to see her.)

We started inspecting Galoot to find the source of blood. At first we thought it was a foot, then I heard Shrike say, "Oh my God!"

I was standing on the other side of him and couldn't see it very well, but from the amount of blood covering the side of his neck, I was expecting to see his ear hanging by a thread.


Looking closer, the ear was where it belonged, but we still couldn't find the source of the blood.

We started to wonder if it was even his - we called PerfectPup in and confirmed that she was okay, I checked all the cats (although the dogs had been outside most of the evening) and Shrike had to stop me from going out in the wet and cold to search the yard for a dead bunny.

Then we noticed that blood was dripping onto the floor, so we figured there must be a wound in there somewhere and it must still be bleeding.

We took him into the bathroom to get a better look and finally were able to see the gash nick, right at the tip of his ear.

Have you ever tried to apply direct pressure to a dog's ear? Yeah, that doesn't work so well.

We tried a wet washcloth. We tried a second wet washcloth, so we could put it on the ear, while he licked the blood off the first one. (Yeah, I know. Ew. But he was insistant.) We tried a dry towel.

No luck, he was still dripping blood and, even better, was shaking his head periodically and slinging little teeny droplets of it everywhere.

I joked that "maybe we should put flour on it?" because that's what the vet had recommended when we snipped one of PerfectPups toenails into the quick and couldn't get it to stop bleeding.

Eventually, we decided that it couldn't hurt, and gave it a try. It took a couple of dips, but it worked pretty quickly.

By that time, we'd realized that he was going to be fine, so we were able to get quite a bit of entertainment from his little white ear, and the "dog blood gravy" that we were making by mixing it with flour.

Looking at his ear today, it's kind of hard to tell, because the fur is still a bit matted in that spot (with blood and flour) but we still can't see an actual injury, so we suspect that it's probably not really even a nick (we really expected he'd be left with a little notch cut out!) but more of a scratch.

We still don't know how it happened - maybe PerfectPup got a bit rough when they were playing - or maybe she got really fed up with him and wasn't playing, maybe he caught it on any number of things in the yard - something on the fence, a tree, who knows, or maybe he scratched himself somehow.

I guess we'll never know what it was, we're just glad it turned out to be mostly a big nevermind. He sure had us worried for a while there.

More Weekend Dog Blogs here.