Bandaging the chest

Chest wounds can be really tricky to bandage, they do tend to slip and the dogs are very wiggly as you will all be aware, so it is quite hard to keep the bandage on. The best thing to do is to try and anchor the bandage around the front legs in what we call a figure-of-eight dressing. If you have a problem here, a cut here, or a wound here, that you need to put a dressing on with some of these wounds if they are not bleeding and there is not a huge risk of contamination, I actually would leave these open until you get to the vet's. But if you have to put a dressing on, this is how I would do it.

Place a dressing with your vet wrap. You are going to just hold that in place initially by just wrapping the bandage all the way around the animal. Again, making sure it is not too tight. At the end we are going to check that it is not too tight by just making sure we can put our fingers underneath each end of the dressing. Then I would start to try and bandage underneath that armpit and then come in front of the other leg, this is where your figure-of-eight comes in. So we are going in front of this leg, back over here, and then under again. Unravel, place. And this time we are going to go in front of the other leg. So on the other side here, we are just going to go in front of this leg. Underneath.

If the dog is very uncomfortable or in pain or you are worried about any other injuries, you do not want to be moving them too much and just place the dressing on as it is, as I have done here. You are going to make sure everywhere where you have got your bandage, you can just pop your finger underneath just to make sure it is not too tight. And over the chest, you want to make sure that they are able to breathe okay. So if they were in any kind of respiratory distress, panting, heaving, then you would not want to be placing a bandage around their chest. But as I say, if you just want to prevent bleeding, try and stem the blood flow, then this would be the way to put that bandage on.