Wound Care at Home: What Is Safe to Treat Yourself

There is a genuine role for treating minor injuries at home, and there is a clear line beyond which doing so causes harm. Knowing where that line sits is most of what this page is for.

The rule that catches people out is that appearance is a poor guide. A long shallow graze looks dramatic and is usually trivial. A bite leaves two small holes and is one of the most reliably troublesome wounds in veterinary practice.

What is safe to handle yourself

Only wounds that are all of the following:

• Superficial, involving the surface of the skin, with no gaping and nothing visible underneath
• Small, roughly the size of a fingernail or less
• Clean, from a known cause, not a bite and not a puncture
• Not bleeding heavily, and settling with brief pressure
• Not on the face, eye, chest, abdomen, genitals or a joint
• On an animal that is otherwise entirely well and will let you touch it without a struggle

Anything failing one of those needs a vet. That is a short list on purpose.

Cleaning a minor wound properly

1. Restrain kindly and safely. Even a gentle animal may bite when a sore spot is touched, and that is not naughtiness, it is reflex. Have someone hold the animal, and stop if it is becoming distressed rather than pushing on
2. Trim the hair around the edges with blunt-ended scissors if you can do so safely. Hair holds dirt against a wound and keeps it damp
3. Flush with plenty of clean water or sterile saline. Volume does the work here, not the strength of anything you add. Boiled and cooled water is fine. A syringe without a needle gives useful pressure if you have one
4. Do not scrub. Damaged tissue does not need abrading; flushing removes contamination perfectly well
5. Pat dry with clean gauze rather than cotton wool, which leaves fibres behind
6. Leave it open if it is minor and in a clean, dry place. Small superficial wounds heal well with air
7. Stop the licking. This is the part that decides whether a minor wound stays minor. A collar for a few days feels unkind and prevents most of the infections that would otherwise follow
8. Check it daily for spreading redness, swelling, heat, discharge or smell, and for whether the animal is becoming quieter or off its food

What never to put on a wound

• Hydrogen peroxide. Widely used and genuinely damaging. It kills healthy tissue along with bacteria and slows healing
• Undiluted antiseptic, spirits or surgical spirit, which are painful and destroy the tissue trying to heal
• Kerosene, petrol, engine oil or battery acid. These circulate as remedies and are offered sincerely. They burn, they are absorbed, and the animal swallows them while grooming
• Human antibiotic creams, which the animal licks off and swallows, and which delay proper treatment while appearing to be doing something
• Powders, ash, salt or toothpaste, all of which trap bacteria under a crust
• Human painkillers. Paracetamol and ibuprofen are dangerous to dogs and more dangerous again to cats. If an animal needs pain relief, that is the reason to go in
• Tight bandaging. A bandage applied too tightly, particularly on a limb or tail, cuts off circulation. Limbs have been lost this way. If a wound needs a dressing, it needs a professional one

Go to a vet the same day for these

• Any bite wound. Dog, cat, rat, snake, anything. Teeth carry bacteria deep and the small entry hole seals over it. Cat bites in particular abscess with impressive reliability
• Punctures of any kind, including nails, thorns and wire. Depth cannot be judged from the surface
• Anything gaping, or where you can see fat, muscle, bone or tendon
• Wounds needing stitches, which is a decision made in the first few hours. A wound left for two days often cannot be closed at all and has to heal open instead
• Bleeding that does not stop with five minutes of firm pressure
• Anything on the eye or eyelid, where hours matter
• Chest or abdominal wounds, however small they look
• Wounds over a joint, where infection can enter the joint itself
• Burns and scalds, which look far better than they are for the first day or two
• Wounds with maggots, which needs clipping, flushing and treatment rather than picking
• Anything already infected: heat, swelling, discharge, smell, or an animal that has gone quiet and off its food
• Any wound on an animal that is diabetic, elderly, on steroids or otherwise unwell, where healing is compromised from the start

Controlling bleeding on the way

Firm, continuous pressure with a clean cloth or gauze. Press and hold rather than lifting to check every thirty seconds, which restarts the bleeding. If the cloth soaks through, add another layer on top rather than removing the first.

Do not apply a tourniquet. They cause severe damage below the point of application and are almost never the right answer outside a clinical setting. Pressure and speed are what you want.

Elevating a bleeding limb helps a little. Keeping the animal calm helps considerably more, because a struggling animal bleeds faster.

The rabies question

Any bite from an unfamiliar dog or cat, or from any wild animal, raises rabies and it must be raised out loud. Do not wait to see how the wound looks. Rabies treatment only works before symptoms appear, and by the time symptoms appear it is invariably fatal in both animals and people.

If a person has been bitten as well, that person needs medical attention on the same day, regardless of how minor the wound seems.

What belongs in the kit

Sterile saline or clean water, gauze swabs, a conforming bandage, blunt-ended scissors, a syringe for flushing, disposable gloves, a collar to stop licking, and a blanket for carrying an injured animal safely. Nothing exotic and nothing expensive.

Our free pet emergency and first-aid checklist is printable and lists the lot, with space for your clinic's out-of-hours number.

Why wounds get worse than they should

Almost always for one of three reasons: the wound was licked, it was treated with something harmful, or it was closed over dirt. All three are avoidable, and all three cost far more to fix than the original wound would have.

The economics here work against the animal in an unusually direct way. A small wound seen on day one is a clean, cheap procedure. The same wound on day four is an abscess requiring sedation, drainage, flushing and a course of antibiotics, and it hurts a great deal more in the meantime. What causes the delay is nearly always the entirely reasonable hope that it will be fine by tomorrow.

Consultations, wound treatment and the sedation these sometimes need are covered on Skeepy Pet HMO plans at any vet clinic in Nigeria, so a wound can be looked at on the day it happens rather than on the day it becomes obvious.