Bandaging the foot

If you have an injury on the foot of your animal, you would want to just check and make sure that they are, first of all, walking okay on the foot. If they are lame and they are holding the foot up, or maybe potentially licking at it, it could be that there is something stuck in the foot that you may want to just examine and remove to start with. Then, in order to protect the foot, again, before you are seen by the vets, give it a nice clean. If you have some salt water or something like Hibiscrub, which is an antibacterial wash, you can give it a good clean in that first before bandaging it. But with any bandage, if you are washing a wound first, make sure the skin is dry before you put the bandage on. So you can use a towel or kitchen towel or something like that after you have washed it just to make sure it is dry.

So if you are going to bandage a foot, it is a little bit different from anywhere else because it is a little bit more difficult to keep the bandage clean once it is on. Say you have got an injury here. What you are going to do with this pad is gently put it over the site, say if we are going to bandage a wound up here on the top of the foot. And then with the bandage, instead of wrapping it round the foot where it could just slide off, it is a better idea to try and include the foot inside the bandage. The same thing applies with all bandages and that you unravel the bandage first if you are using something like vet wrap. Place that over the end of the foot, unravel, back over the end of the foot, unravel. Pads will probably try and slip away. And then you can start to bandage round. And you want to make sure that you are just enclosing the foot. Sorry, Maddie. Enclosing the foot in that bandage. Again, nice and loose, but not too loose that it is going to slide straight off. Unravel.

And normally with bandages on the feet, I try and bandage up to the wrist or the carpus, or in the back leg it would be up to the ankle or the hock, as we call it, just so that it's less likely to slip once they put their foot down. Now, you have got to think about bandage care after you have placed that bandage on. So if it is very wet or muddy, you might decide to just cover the bandage with something like a poo disposal bag, or some kind of waterproof packaging that you can just pop over there. And you can just loosely tie that on, if necessary, or if you have got handles on the poo disposal bag, you can just quite loosely tie those around the top of the bandage. Again, these are temporary measures so they are not going to be on for very long. If at any point your dog or cat or whoever you are bandaging is uncomfortable with the bandage, remove it straight away.

They may not want to put the foot down initially because it is an extra weight on their foot, and that is quite normal. But as long as they are not uncomfortable with it, you are fine to leave that bandage on until you can then be seen by the vets.