Now My Dog Knows I'm an Idiot

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I spent ten minutes this afternoon scrubbing blood off of my arms.

Mr killdare and I had never attempted to trim my dog’s nails before today. Well, ends up we’re not so good at it. My yorkie-poo, Took, bled profusely from one of her nail-talons that had been cut too close. (FYI, the longer the nail grows, the longer the “wick” also grows. NOW I know this.) Yeah, I’m not so hot with blood or bleeding, particularly coming from my baby girl. So I became an absolutely blathering moron. “Uh, uh, uh, Oh my God, should we take her to the to the to the vet?”

So we took her to the vet because we couldn’t stop the bleeding on our own, and common sense had escaped us both. Stiptic? Didn’t have any. We tried caking flour or baking soda on the bleeding nail. Didn’t work.

When we go to the office, Mr killdare and I were wild-eyed and absolutely covered in blood. I was dangerously near passing out from catching sight of her blood-soaked paw dripping more blood onto the floor when I let off pressure from the towel, and had driven like a lunatic the entire way there. Mr killdare had on his super cool “Where My Bitches At?” T-Shirt, but now it looks like he wore it to get his ass kicked. Blood, blood, blood.

I’ve just finished cleaning blood off my arms and legs, out of the car, off my bed, out of the sink, out of the carpet, and our clothes are soaking.

But Took’s all better! Frankly, for someone capable of rational thought under pressure and who is not dumbstruck in complete horror, it looked pretty easy to remedy. “Quick-Stop” stopped the bleeding, and hydrogen peroxide removed blood from her fur so I could remain conscious. But I’ve caught her looking at me with complete disgust twice since we got back.

Lessons learned:

-I’ll never attempt clipping her nails again, ever.
-I suck, as well as stutter, in emergencies. Truly. I barely made sense.
-I can never have children, as I’m sure I’ll freak out during the first emergency and pass right out.
-I’m not a good driver. But I knew that before.

So, anyone else have emergencies involving pets, kids, yourself, that didn’t bring out the best in you?

2

Oh no…what an awful experience. I’m glad everyone is OK now. I bring all my animals in for their nail trimmings, just because I hate being the “bad guy”. The vets do it quickly and cleanly, and they get the dirty looks from the animals when their razor-sharp claws get clipped. I tried doing it myself, and I will trim the very tips off my cats’ nails with a human clipper, but then the cats run and hide under the bed and generally hate me for the next twelve hours…not worth it.

I remember when I came home from work and found my cat with a puncture wound in her side (she got mixed up in a “dog disagreement”). I panicked, my boyfriend had to drive us to the vet’s office, and I remember my mouth being dry and I couldn’t talk…I was babbeling, it was terrible.

3

First of all, I gave up trimming my bassets nails long ago. He gets so bent about it, he often expresses his anal glands on whomeever is doing it. Phew!

My story: Our beloved basset had been recently neutered. We come home from some errand and the dog is, as usual, ecstatic to see us. He rolls over for a belly rub and I notice two huge bizarre swellings on either side of his penis. it looks for all the world like instead of removing his gonads, they lost them in his body and they migrated several inches forward and now were swelling up grotesquely. I felt the lumps–hard and unyielding. Certain that death was imminent, we throw the dog in the car and race to the vet’s office.

Whereupon I get a little anatomy lesson. My basset had a little stiffy because he was so thrilled to see us, and apparently boy dogs have swelling nodules near the base of the penis when aroused. I believe the vet explained that this helps them retain their position in the female when copulating.

To their credit, they managed to not burst out laughing. At least not until we were fully out of earshot.

4

Cranky, next time ask the Teeming Millions…we’ll set you straight and won’t charge you for the lesson or laugh at you!

We bred Bassets when I was in HS; the puppies are particularly cute, running and tripping over their ears! We had a tricolor English and bred her to a lemon & white French; they made cute pups.

We currently have Golden Retrievers, and don’t clip their nails for the reason stated in the OP. To stop the bleeding the vet gave us silver nitrate sticks to chemically cauterize the nail, but it hurt her and just wasn’t worth the trouble.

5

yuk! I hate animal emergencies, though I’m pretty good with them. My covered in blood story was with my cat.

As a little baby kitten Will (my beautiful white and grey striped half siamese darling) climbed a tree and forgot how to get down.

Since he was only up about ten feet and I’m six feet tall I held my hands up and tried to get him to jump the foot or so down to my fingers. He, being a trusting and loyal baby, did attempt this…and missed my hands…and landed face first onto the pavement. He skinned his nose and was sneezing blood all over. I cleaned him up and calmed him down and went late to first hour after washing my hands.

I missed the blood on my face, shirt, hair…

Luckily there was a sink in my first hour.

6

My dog knows I’m an idiot too.

A few years ago, before I was married, I lived with two roommies, Kathy and Jason. We smoked a lot of weed. (I know, shocking) :slight_smile:
One night, I was online (another big shock), with my back turned to the living room. Kathy had rolled a few joints and left them on the coffee table and went into the kitchen with Jason to make snacks. Nothing unusual about that, we were about to settle in for a night of TV, weed and junkfood.
I was sitting by the computer doing bong hits and chatting, and I happened to turn around and see our little dog Max laying on the couch and eating something. He liked to chew up our things, so I got up to check what he had. All I saw were a few little green crumbs between his paws.
I called Kathy in and asked her if she left weed on the table. When we realized exactly how much this little 6 pound dog had ingested, we freaked out. There we were, totally stoned off our asses, panicking because we poisoned our dog, and none of us in any condition to drive.
What if he dies? What will we do? How will we tell people our dog died because he ate our drugs??? We’re horrible, horrible people! Kathy and I were both crying. Max just sat there. Jason was rolling on the floor laughing.
Jason, the man of the house that he was, told us to quit crying and just call the vet. I calmed myself down enough to make the call. As soon as the words “My dog ate some marijuana” came out of my mouth, Jason nearly exploded from laughter. (“My dog ate some marijuana” became something of a catch phrase for a while there.)
The vet hat I spoke to laughed and told me not to worry. Max would be fine, he just has to sleep it off. Poor little Maxxie.

We learned a valuable lesson that day.
Too bad I forgot what it was. :wink:

Rose

7

I would have freaked to have one of my babies (one cat, one dog) bleeding like that. But I have to cut my dog’s nails and I have to be sly, like when she is in bed at night. With anyone else, she gets nasty about it. With me she just moves her foot, but doesn’t try the biting thing. So I do the clipping and save the vet his/her fingers. She really is a mommies girl.

The time I almost passed out was when I took my cat to the vet. He had been staying with a friend while I had to go out of town on business. Julian had an open sore on his shoulder when I got home, so rushed to vet. They asked if I wanted to stay in the room while they were working on him. I said yes, bad move. They had to put him to sleep. As I watched him go limp, my body went to jello. I sat in the waiting room until they brought him out. This lap junkie died a few years ago from old age.

8

katie, that’s horrible. I have no emergency to relate that I can recall, but I can tell you that I used to open my mouth and my vocal chords would freeze in panic situations. Not so handy when you need to tell the driver he’s about to smash into a semi. I’m glad everything’s cool.
Wicked Blue, that shit was hilarious.

9

And you complain that Bernard is the trusting soul while Will is antisocial? Hmm…

10

Jesus Deb! You scared me! I thought you ment that you had to put yout kitty to sleep. I was like “AAAgh! You euthanised your kitty for a boo-boo?!?!?!?”

Then I realized what you meant. :slight_smile: Poor kitty.

I don’t have any pet horror stories, but clipping my ratties’ nails? OOOh, the squirming! The squeeking! The angry looks! Two person job! But, no biting! My boys are good boys!

11

My great aunt is nuts, batty and crazy, all at the same time.

She decided to cut her budgie’s toenails. Fair enough. So she gets the clippers and cut’s on too deep. It starts to bleed a little bit and she gets a bit worried.

So, what does she do?

A. Get a band-aid and patch the budgie up.
B. Call the vet.
C. Get her husband to break it’s neck thus ‘putting it out of it’s misery’

Clue: it’s not A or B

I was shocked and declined dinner that night. (just to be on the safe side).

Wicked Blue > We got a friends dog stoned once too. It ate about a quarter of rocky.

It went totally mental. It ran around the garden for about an hour, then went to the kitchen where it proceeded to bark at it’s bowl.

We fed it 6 cans of dog food and then it ran into the nearest wall, passed out and slept for about 24 hours.

How we laughed.

12

I used to do Iiko Puppy-Dog Boy’s nails when he was a tyke. He has white/clear nails so it wasn’t difficult to avoid bloodshed, although I had to sit on him to hold him still.

As he got older, I let the process get away from me. Now I take him to Petsmart every 4 weeks and they do it for US$8.00. They even had a special last time: for US$12.00 they cleaned his ears also.

13

I trim the nails on both my dogs, and I use a Dremel to grind them down. I have to do it outside, since it makes a lot of dust that smells like burnt protein, but I find it easier than clipping. Especially on big dogs with thick nails.

14

I have a ferret, Raisin, who at her current rate of growth will be bigger than I am by the end of the year (the vet says she’s fine, not overweight, but yikes is she big for a female!). Raisin’s “sister,” Twitch, is good about nail-clipping and tolerates the process like an angel.

Raisin squirms like she’s being tortured before I even manage to get the clippers firmly in hand. When I release her to the floor, she bitches and sputters and runs in circles doing the patented ferret war dance to make her displeasure clear. It’s gotten to the point where I just snatch her up at random and clip a nail or two every couple of days to keep them all at a reasonable length.

Interestingly enough, this is the same ferret who reclines like an infant in the arms of our vet’s assistant, who can then clip her nails with zero problems. Little faker!

15

You’d think I was mortally wounding my cats when I try to clip their nails. I had to wrap them up in a towel with only the paw exposed and even that is a risky, and noisy, venture! Poor caterwauling things make me so sad, I haven’t even tried to clip them in months.

16

Being the brutal hard-nose that I am (yeah, right), I taught the cats early that a little pedicure was normal and not harmful. I cut their nails about every 3 weeks or so. No harm, no foul. Mr. Kitty has only bitten me once and after a gentle thump on the head, he hasn’t done it since.

I’m very careful to just cut off the sharp part and not go past the curve of the nail.

I had a friend who wanted me to cut her (very) spoiled cat’s nails because she was shredding up everything trying to get the old cuticle off and etc.

Now Kitty (that’s actually her name) was about 15 lbs of spoiled rotten cat. I grabbed her (trust me, I never hurt a cat - love 'em too much), put her between my legs, effectively sitting on her, grabbed a paw and started to trim. I never in any way hurt the cat. By the time I was on the 2nd claw (hadn’t even finished one paw yet), Kitty was yowling like I was pulling her nails out with red-hot pokers and Lisa said, practically with tears in her eyes, “Oh Michelle, stop. Just let her go! I’ll take her to the vet sometime.” I rolled my eyes at her and got off the cat. She picked her up and started in on the baby talk. Ick.

Don’t get me wrong; I baby talk my cats as much as anyone else, but this made me think of the mom in the grocery store who buys the screaming brat anything if they’ll “be good”.

17

Clipping nails is fun, isn’t it? I trim every couple of weeks and always “pink” Lucy. (Jack Russell Terrorist nails do grow that fast. So do Bassett nails.) I always have the “Quick-Stop” close at hand. Pressing the bleeding nail into a bar of soap will also stop the bleeding.

I haven’t have too much problem with my own dogs. The Little Woman has though. A subacious cyst blew all over her pants. She was at the vet’s to have the cyst looked at. Timing, timing.

She was also the one to find the dog when she broke her dew claw off. Blood was spewing that day, too.

Silver nitrate (Vestal Blue) and Dremmel Tools (Dire Wolf)? Yowie-zowie.
-Rue.

18

A couple things that work to stop bleeding nails when you don’t have Kwik-Stop or stypic:

Regular flour
Corn starch

A nail will stop bleeding by itself in about 20 minutes, but it does make a huge mess.

I too Dremel my dogs’ nails. They like it ever so much better than the clippers. I think the pressure of the clippers bothers them. If you or your dog have long hair though, keep it the hell away from the Dremel. It’ll get caught on the sandpaper wheel and get ripped out. The wheel also gets hot, so you grind for a second or two, hold the Dremel away from the nail for a second or two, and repeat.

This is a really good website on how to Dremel dog nails:

http://members.nbci.com/DoberDawn/dremel.html

19

I am now the owner (am owned by?) three Brittanies. Lou now 12 was a year old when we got her and strongly resisted having her nail trimmed but with perserverance and a bit of stubborness on my part she learned that it was going to be done either the hard way or the easy way but it would be done. She never bit or anything but there was much squirming and cursing.

Buck came home when he was six weeks old and he got his introduction to the clippers immediately. Even before there was enough nail to clip, I would hold him and look at his foot, holding the clippers up to the nail and letting him watch. I also got him used to the fact that he would be brushed and his ears would be looked at. Now 4 years old he doesn’t bat an eye when I call him to be groomed and it’s over in a flash.

Jake-no pics yet-- came to live with us last Wednesday. It was unexpected and I don’t know that I was quite ready for another pup but one look and I’m in love. Yeah I’m a sucker. Anyway Jake is four months old and has obviously never seen a pair of nail clippers. Between his needle sharp puppy teeth–that he is in the process of losing and his his equally needle sharp toenails, my arms look like I’ve been blackberry picking. So today I decided that it was time for Jake to get a manicure. To say he was resistant is an understatement. He weighs no more than ten pounds but a full-grown grizzly couldn’t have been any harder to manage. I fought him for 30 minutes while he wriggled, scratched,kicked, whined and put up such a fuss that Buck came over to investigate and see what the hell was going on. He looked at me, looked at the clippers, looked at Jake, and then walked away with a look in his eyes that said “Son, you might as well get used to it.” In those 30 minutes I managed to get 3 toenails done.

I thought there has got to be an easier way. I figured he was fighting me because he could see a way out, I decided I would take away that option. I wrapped him in a blanket like a baby and covered his head with a towel–this disorients and calms them believe it or not. Then I held him for a minute and talked soothingly to him till he was nearly asleep. Then I lay him on the couch, facing away from me as I kneeled on the floor then exposing only one foot at a time, I clipped and filed the remaining talons in about 5 minutes. Easy as pie. Then I let him up gave him lots of hugs and a treat and a drink, then put him outside for a minute. He came back in went right to his kennel and went to sleep.

I guess the moral of the story is once they realize who is in control of the situation the struggling stops. I have accidently clipped too close with the others and when that happens I put a little pile of regular flour or cornstarch on a tissue, place the nail on it and apply pressure for a few minutes. It helps to sit on the floor with them while you hold the pressure. With a littler dog you could just hold them in your lap.

Next installment–bathing and brushing and examining the ears and mouth .

20

After all that I forgot to mention my one good hint for working on the nails. I think a lot of the discomfort for them comes when the nail is allowed to twist around when it’s being clipped.

Hold each toenail–not just the toe— firmly as you clip it. It cuts cleaner and quicker and with much less chance of going in some odd angle or too close. This really does work. I then follow with a file to smooth the sharp edges. I live in the country with not much concrete around but if your dogs walk on the sidewalks or whatever that isn’t necessary.