Bandaging the ear

With ear wounds, every dog has a slightly different conformation of ear. Some dogs will have ears that tend to stick up, other dogs will have quite floppy ears that tend to prefer to lay down the side of their faces. So there is a limit as to how much you may be able to do with the ear bandage. However, if you do have a dog that has an ear that can go up or down, then where you are going to bandage really depends on where the wound is.

In this dog, there is a slice wound down the side of the ear pinna, so it does not really matter which way you are going to bandage it. It is really how comfortable it would be, the most comfortable position for that dog. If you have a dressing, piece of dressing first, you are going to apply that onto the sore area, the cut area or the area that is most at risk of contamination, so the most open part of the wound. This bandage is just going to help keep the bleeding at bay before you then go and see a vet, and also help prevent contamination and infection into the open wound.

So you are going to place your dressing. With this dog, because I am putting the dressing on the inside of the ear, I am going to try and bandage the ear up the way. This is mainly because if I bandage it down here and the dressing slips, then this open part of the wound is exposed to this furred area of skin, which could be carrying bacterias, and the fur is also could potentially be muddy or wet. So we want to protect this wound from being in contact with the fur. If we bandage the ear up this way, and the dressing slips, the wound is only coming into contact with the bandage, which is a much cleaner surface. So place your dressing like this. With all bandaging, like we have said before, you unravel the bandage, and then place it over the heads. This probably is going to be a two-person job, especially in a wound that is uncomfortable for the dog, because they are not going to particularly like you doing this. The idea of the bandage is that we are just holding that dressing in place.

So initially, you are going to go round the back of the dog's ear, the other ear. You want to try and spare this other ear and do not include this in the bandage, and you also want to make sure that you are not popping the bandage over their eyes. We do not want to distress the dog anymore than we have to. We just want to try and control this bleeding. And if we pop it around the back of the other ear, then what I tend to do is try and pop it in front of this other ear. Bear in mind, always trying to avoid covering up the eye or the other ear. Ear bandages do tend to slip. There is not a lot you can do about that and the dog will try and shake the bandage off. This is probably all I would do just to keep that dressing in place until you can then get the dog to a vet to be seen and assessed properly.