Welcome to Animal Posse, the podcast dedicated to the people and rescues, making a difference in the lives of animals. Thank you for coming on the show today, Dr. Milazzo.

Thank you Dixie.

One thing that I would like to discuss today is pet first aid. I thought that would make an interesting show. And of course, it's always better to have a veterinarian's take on it. So just in general, first aid what can you do if something goes wrong at home with your pet?

Well, the first thing you wanna think about is I always think about the ABCs of emergency, right? Airway breathing, and it's in circulation. The first things I always think about are during an emergency if I can't think of anything else and my nerves have the best of me, I always think A, B, C, when I see a patient in front of me. And this is the case with humans as well. If you come across a person that's in distress, A, B, C, airway, breathing, and circulation, those are the first three things that you need to worry about, are they breathing? Can they breathe? Do they have an airway? Is something stuck in their throat? Are they making noise? If they're making noise, then chances are they're probably not aspirating on anything. Breathing. Are they actively breathing? Are they able to breathe? And then circulation would be, do they have a heartbeat? Or they spurting blood out of an artery, or, or a vein, which would be a lot less. Traumatic to witness, but still a lot of blood. Is there bleeding going on? And if any of those three things are compromised, you need to get to the ER immediately. There's not, there's some things you can do at home first aid wise in those cases, but they would probably require you to have some sort of medical background. But as far as home emergencies, there are some things you can have around the house to help you with small emergencies that might help you avoid a nighttime after hours vet visit. Like, torn toenails is a big one that, that I see in the ER that really doesn't need to be an emergency, but having some quick stop, which is like a a sulfur po like a styptic stick. Like, men would use for shaving on their face or any, anyone can use for shaving on their face or wherever. And you can pack that in a toenail. Profuse vomiting. The one thing I tell people about that is stop feeding them nothing by mouth. NPO means nothing by mouth until they stop vomiting. An animal can comfortably go till the next day without eating just fine. A lot of people wanna give them something to eat or drink or somehow take an active role in the vomiting. You just need to let them vomit a few times and get it out and try not to have them hold that back. Let them get whatever they need to get out. If vomiting persists multiple times or blood in the vomit, then maybe it's time to go to the er. But usually vomiting once it's stopped. It's like us, we don't always go to the ER every time we vomit, but if we vomit continually for days, then yes we can get dehydrated and end up having to go to the er.

Now I have heard too, when you have animals that do have one of these vomiting episodes or even like a diarrhea. you should feed the pet more gentler foods after the episode just to make sure that their system can handle it. Like people, like you always tell people to eat. Something like rice or oatmeal. Oatmeal,

Exactly. Have a sip of coke and a saltine cracker. Yes, exactly. The equivalent for animal, although we wanna keep them NPO, nothing by mouth. For at least the rest of the day and into the next day. Like, if it's happens during the day, don't feed them anything till the next morning. And another thing is people will want them to quote, unquote, stay hydrated, but. They'll fill up a water bowl and give it to an animal, and the animal drinks the whole bowl at once, and then it all comes right back up again because of the volume in the stomach. So I tell people, you don't have to deprive them of water, but just fill the water bowl just a little bit and leave it out for the animal to drink. And then you know when that's gone, you can refill it, a couple of times, but you don't wanna let them have access to unlimited water that they're just gonna continue to throw up multiple times. And then the next day, once they've had lots of gi rest, you can start introducing something to dogs or cats. Plain boiled chicken breast is safe for pretty much anything. And white or brown rice, everything cooked really well. I always tell people, make a jambalaya. If you're from New Orleans or Louisiana rather. And you can feed that to them. And generally most animals will eat and keep that down if everything's going in the right direction. If that comes up the next day, then we need to start talking about further diagnostics like x-ray or seeing the veterinarian for blood work.

I know on the last show you talked about foreign bodies,

uhhuh,

and that if a foreign body was ingested, that's something that you definitely need to go to the vet for.

Absolutely. It's a very serious thing.

What about if you suspect your pet has had something poisonous?

Well, if you suspect it depends on what it is. There are different ways to react to it. If it's a poisonous plant, it's a good idea to. Have a picture of the plant or know what the plant is so that your vet will know what to do based on that. Also medication, whether it's legal, prescription medication or off the street drugs. We are not the police. You can tell us what it is. You don't have to tell us where it came from or who it belongs to. You just have to tell us what your animal got into or possibly got into and we'll get the hint. And things like batteries bleach, those are things that are going to be scarring and irritating to the mucosa. So those are not the things you wanna make your animal throw up if they ingest, because it's going to hurt coming back up and do damage the same way it did going down. So that's something you're gonna wanna bring to the vet. But for the most part if you catch them quickly, if it's medication like human medication or illicit drugs, you can give them some hydrogen peroxide and they will. Generally throw it up if you've caught it within the first 20 minutes. You want complete, gastric, emptying things like chocolate or really chocolate's a big one, but also I see people overreact to chocolate. A couple of m and ms are not gonna hurt a small dog. It's the percent of cacao that's in the chocolate. So for example, a little dog eats a whole bar of baker's dark chocolate. That's a lot of cacao for a little dog. So you're gonna wanna immediately induce vomiting. The quicker the better. If you can give them some hydrogen peroxide orally at home and get them to throw all of that chocolate up, that would be great. If it's been longer than a half hour or an hour, then you're gonna wanna go to the vet. Or if you get them to vomit and the chocolate doesn't come up, you still wanna follow up with the vet. One that I've had issues with people over time are grape toxicity. Grapes I'm not saying to feed your animal a lot of grapes, but grapes are not. Immediate, immediate vomit inducing one grape, one grape is not going to kill anything. Although apparently I have a couple colleagues that believe otherwise. I have never seen it. I've never had a friend, colleague see it where an animal has passed away from eating one grape. So, definitely not a reason to visit the er, but. Again, this is why I also stress the importance of having a relationship with your regular veterinarian. Because if you can reach them even after hours, you can avoid a very huge emergency bill. Just by having a simple question answered.

Now, a new thing I've been hearing a lot about is xylitol, 'cause that's in a lot of gums and stuff like that.

Yep. That is a problem. That's something you want them to throw up immediately as well. Anything with xylitol is bad news for them. They can't process xylitol what like we do. And so, Splenda, all of those packets of sugar substitute, those are all bad news. I had a dog eat a whole bag of Splenda packets once, which would've been pretty ugly, but thankfully the people got the dog to throw up at their house with hydrogen peroxide. So generally that's something you want to get them to throw up right away, or a whole bag of gum, like multiple packs of gum would be a problem. Like a 10 pack of gum not 10 sticks, although, a five pound dog eating 10 sticks would be quite a lot. But, it's a per pound or per kilogram toxicosis thing, but avoid xylitol. Also, people will feed their animals pills and peanut butter and a lot of the peanut butters today have sugar substitutes in them and not real sugars. So I always tell people, when you give your animals things that are made for people, make sure it's not sugar free. So what about for choking? And I'm just talking about just like a regular food. Your dog or your cat is just scarfing down the food. And they start choking. Well, there's two kinds of things. There's aspiration, that's when food goes down the air pipe, and then there's what we call choke, which is when food gets lodged in the esophagus. And they'll start profusely, drooling, foaming at the mouth. They can still breathe, but they're just stopped up in the food tube basically. And it won't go down or up. And sometimes esophagus can go into a spasm and will hold that food like a big bolus there. If that doesn't melt over a little bit of time or with some warm water, then you need to get them to the vet right away for that. If an animal's aspirating, depending on what it is you're not gonna have a whole lot of time. It's like a person, if you have a person that's got food in the air tube, you've gotta do the Heimlich maneuver, you can. Flip your pets upside down and shake them a little bit press on the lungs so that the air can force whatever is in their windpipe out as anything caught in the trachea is stopping breathing. And you don't have a whole lot of time. So when people call me and tell me their animal's choking and they've been on the phone with me for five minutes, I'm like, well, is your animal still alive? And they're like, well, yeah, they're still choking. I'm like, okay, bring them in. Clearly they're breathing 'cause they'd be dead by now. So come on in and we'll figure out what's going on. And a lot of times, some of it's maybe partial aspiration of food. Where it can cause a pneumonia, so we have to give antibiotics or take a chest x-ray and see what's going on. A lot of times that's the case. They can still get air, but something has gone down the wrong pipe basically.

Now I just had a bottle feeding class uhhuh for newborn kittens. I've never had a kitten aspirate, but I've went over all the steps of how a kitten could aspirate. The correct feeding posture and things like this. But one thing that I notice often with the kittens when I bottle feed them is you'll always get that one kitten They just are acting like they're starving to death. They're taking that bottle so fast that they will actually start coughing and choking uhhuh. So what I typically do is I will just grab 'em when they start coughing like that. I'll hold them up and I'll pat 'em on the back. Yep. And that usually clears it. Is that the correct way to handle that?

Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely. If you have to. When we first deliver small mammals, cats and dogs a lot of times they're born with fluid in their airway just like a human baby is. And we have to actually, turn them upside down and swing them a little bit to dislodge, fluids in the airway. So a little bit of gravity really works a long way. You only have a small amount of time to get that out. So however you can is gonna be the best way to do it.

So another thing that I would like to talk about is I guess like, respiratory infections. And congestion. And this would be if you have a cat or a dog, you take 'em to the vet. The vet is like, okay, they got a upper respiratory infection, gives you your meds, you go home. What are things that you can do to help them along with that illness and getting over it?

Keeping their face clean and their nose and eyes clean is really important because the more mucus and crust that builds up on their face, the harder it is for them to get better. Then they can start to get skin fold infections and the, the bacteria or viral particles hang around a whole lot longer in that mucus. So you wanna clear that as much as possible. I have seen people use human baby nose drops to help with congestion, especially in cats that are really congested. The little noses brand, I don't know if they still make that anymore, but something similar to that. A drop up each nostril certainly would not hurt to help open up the airway a little bit. Plain saline with a Q-tip. Digging out boogers. It, it works for babies and it works for kittens and puppies.

Now, this might be a stupid question, but when you're gonna do the nose drops for a cat are you gonna basically hold 'em like a baby and then drop it down? Yep. So gravity does its job.

Yep. Exactly. You don't wanna force it in there, but just put it at the opening of the nose and it'll make its way back.

What about like putting them in a steamy shower?

Yes.

That's like a bathroom, a steamy bath. Or not a shower, but,

yep. Yeah, exactly. No, that actually has helped a lot of animals. They now have home nebulizers and all kinds of things that you can buy for pets with like chronic problems. They even have you know how sometimes for us they'll dispense aerosol sprays for asthmatics and stuff like that. They're adaptation tools you can fit onto those types of aerosol sprays for animals now, like masks and stuff. So if you have an animal with chronic breathing problems, you can ask your vet for something like that.

And what about like a coupage

yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

And coupage, can you explain a little bit what that is?

Well, Cupping basically and using an open hand to, I guess Pat, but it's a little more aggressive than Pat to loosen up mucus throughout the lungs so that they can cough it up. It does work. It's a very old fashioned thing, but it has worked and that's why it's still around today.

And it typically, if it's working, will make them cough after you.

Exactly.

You tap 'em, right?

Exactly. Exactly. In fact. Sometimes increase in coughing worries people, but when you have an animal that's really congested with thick mucus, you want to hear that mucus move and start to try to make its way out rather than just continuing to build up inside of the animal's Airways.

Another thing I'd like to touch on since we are in southeast Louisiana. And it is really hot.

Oh yes.

And really humid.

Oh yes.

And really nasty out. Yes. But aside from that, is heat stroke.

Absolutely.

So what are signs of heatstroke and cats and dogs?

Well, the first thing you're gonna see is heavy panting. And most people at that point know it's time to come inside. Especially with your brachycephalic breeds of dogs and cats too, which means the smush face guys. So, they absolutely cannot breathe in hot weather. So you wanna definitely keep them cool, for sure. But some things that start to happen past the paning and the exhaustion is collapse. The body temperature will rise to obscenely hot numbers. We're talking 1 0 6, 1 0 7. They'll start seizing. Or you might see neurological abnormalities start like staggering or nystagmus, which is where the eyes go very fast back and forth. And you may see them poop or pee on themselves. These are all signs that, heat stroke is happening. Vomiting also. Generally by the time that we have seizures starting, we're in dire emergency at that point. So I've lost a lot of animals that have come in too late and are at that point, and their temperatures are 106 hundred and seven, and the only thing we can do at that point is try to give them some Valium to stop the seizures and start soaking them in ice. Sometimes it works, but sometimes it's too late.

Is there anything that you could do at home if you notice that your pet is overheating?

If it's overheating to the point of collapse and vomiting, you can get it into an ice bath. You wanna try everything you can to get that temperature down as quickly as possible. So if it's past panting and they've collapsed, just, and you always wanna make sure they're, they continue to breathe. That's important. If they vomit or start to vomit, don't let them aspirate on that. And you just gotta get that body temperature as cool as possible, as quickly as possible.

Another concern that I have is 4th of July is coming up. And I know that is the time of year when the most pets go lost and go missing.

Absolutely.

'Cause they freak out from all of the fireworks.

Yep.

Anything that you can do at home to comfort those animals?

Well, one thing I always tell people, if you have a puppy and it starts showing signs of either thunderstorm anxiety or fireworks or loud noise anxiety, the best thing you can do is not feed into it. And it's hard because, they're cute. They're your pets, they're your babies. You want to comfort them and have them come to you for that comfort. But a lot of times the way that they see that is, oh. The rest of the pack is also scared and they're trying to huddle us together, so this must be really bad, and so it's this negative feedback loop or to where they get worse instead of better. And people think they're making it better by consoling them or picking the animal up or holding them or patting 'em or doing something. The best thing you can do is continue to act like nothing is wrong. Turn on some music. Maybe play a fetch game with them. Give them a few snacks. It's important for you to act like nothing is wrong. And I'm not saying ignore their stress behavior, but try to redirect it. And now with some animals, it's too late. They're already several years old and they've developed phobias to fireworks and loud noises, thunderstorms, things like that. You can still reassure your animal by remembering, they think you're the pack leader usually in most homes. And, you want to remain calm and not show any sign of alarm. But there's some animals they just lose it when these things happen. So those are the animals that you wanna ask your veterinarian for something to give. Sedation wise, there are also some really good calming treats that are made with nutraceuticals that are out there. Vetriscien science, I'm not, I don't work for them or anything, but I just happen to like using their products because they seem to work. I think it has lavender and chamomile and other things like that, that are calming and sometimes at twice the dose, sometimes those seem to really help a lot. So, that might work. If that doesn't work, then you wanna go to your vet for something a little bit stronger. Some people try Benadryl. Sometimes Benadryl will have the opposite effect on the animal and make them hyper. But you certainly can try. Benadryl, the sort of universal dose of Benadryl is a milligram per pound. So a 50 pound dog can take a 50 milligram Benadryl tablet. So, you can try that. Sometimes it's just not enough. Usually in my experience, it's not quite enough and sometimes even with sedatives from the vet, it's still not enough. So you really have to make sure that your animal does not get disoriented and escape. And also make sure your animals microchipped so that if it does get out, it has a means of getting home.

And I saw a tip too, that if you don't have a tag with the pet's name on it, you can actually just go get yourself a piece of the blue painter's tape.

Yep

Just tape it onto their collar

Yep.

And write all their information.

Exactly. Anything will help. I am a big advocate of apple tags or air tags on collars. That has saved quite a few animals that I've met. If the animal will allow it on their collar and usually they don't weigh very much in those silicone holders that sort of fit along flush to the neck around the the collar are pretty good.

All right. Well thank you so much.

Sure.

For all of your insight.

You've got some really good questions there.

Alright, well thank you again.

Absolutely.

Before we end today's episode, I thought I would go over a rescue story of mine. So just to let everybody know how I got started in rescue. I kind of got started the same way a lot of our guests did. You grow up, you love animals. If you see an animal that's in trouble when you're a child, you're always trying to help. And I was the same way. I had a lot of different pets growing up. I had rabbits, I had cats. I raised baby ducks. 'cause we had a place that was in Mississippi on the water. So we actually raised a bunch of mallards to let go on the canal that was by our property, which was really cool because they would bring the babies back to visit us every season. And so they always remembered us, the original ones, and they would always bring their babies back to see us. So of course, as I got older and I had the means of taking care of. animals without my parents' permission, I got a lot more involved whenever I would see an animal that was in trouble. So one of the first rescue experiences that I actually had was finding kittens by my house. This was like the first thing that really kind of got me started. I knew the importance of spay and neuter, and my parents always instilled that in me. So I knew that you had to go get your animals spayed and neutered. I knew it was a very important thing. So every animal that I had growing up, it was always spayed and neutered. But when I found these kittens, at my house, it was four kittens and the mom. And so I remember I had to go trap these kittens and this is before I even had a trap. So I actually had to go out and try to just kind of devise a way to catch these kittens. I can't even remember how I did it. I may have done it. Kind of like what people do when you kind of set up that, like a box trying to catch a bird when you're a kid. that never works. And I think that I might have actually done that to catch these kittens, but it was four of them. And it was the saddest thing. I remember when I caught 'em because when we had 'em inside in a cage, the mom was coming in the patio room and she was so sad, crying, trying to get to her babies. And they weren't that, young. They were probably about seven weeks. And I still remember all of 'em. I named 'em, it was shy, smudge mantu. And stretch. And I had these four kittens, and then I had the mom coming around and I'm like, well, we can't have more kittens. And so I have to look into getting mom spayed And I was pretty young at the time. I was in my very early twenties. I might have been 20 21. And of course, I didn't have any money to get this done. And this was before a lot of the programs that we have now for low cost. So I was like, oh what am I gonna do here? I have five of 'em and I have to figure out a way to go get them spayed and neutered. So I did a little bit of research on the internet and I did find out that they had a voucher program at the time. I remember I had to call this number and you would leave a voicemail. You would give them all the details, how many cats you have, what they look like, if you know if they're boys or girls. So I went ahead and I did all that and they called me back a couple of days later and they're like, look, we can get your kittens spayed and neutered. It's low cost. So it was something that was very much affordable, better than me taking these five animals to go just to a regular vet. And luckily the mom, we were able to kind of get her tame enough to where we could kind of get her in a carrier and we just closed the door real fast. So that's how we were able to get her. 'cause I didn't even have humane traps at that time. I didn't even know about TNR it was a very brand, new thing. So I took 'em. We got 'em all spayed and neutered. Of course, we let 'em go. The kittens stayed around we could actually pet two of the kittens. Two of them really wouldn't let us pet 'em. One of them got very, very tame and she actually moved in with some neighbors that lived behind us. That was my first experience into. trap neuter return. I didn't even know they were gonna get an ear tip. I didn't know what an ear tip was. And so that's how I learned what the ear tip was. And, and from that point on, I got very interested in, of course, doing the trap neuter and return TNR. So it was a couple of years after this. And philip was working at a construction site and he found this tiny, tiny little kitten in the middle of the summer on some rebar, which was kind of like these big metal plates that they have at construction sites. And so he called me up and he's like, Hey, I have this kitten. It's in really bad shape. And so I was like, yeah, bring it home. So he brought it home, and I remember we put the kitten in this little tiny carrier, and the kitten was probably about three to four weeks old. So it would've been just on the point of kind of getting weaned and eating on its own. And this baby was so, so dehydrated. So I called up to see about getting an appointment at the vet and at the time we couldn't get it into the vet until the next day. So I went and got some Pedialyte and Kitten formula and I just said, okay, I am gonna try my best. So for. Every couple of hours I would go just give this kitten like a little bit of fluid. And, of course it was orally, I was just doing some drips in its mouth with a little tiny eyedropper that we had and I noticed by the evening he was a completely different looking kitten. And it was really amazing to see the difference. And that was really kind of like my first experience with a kitten that small. 'cause most of the time when I had kittens they were a little bit older. So this was the smallest one that I ever took care of and raised. At the time, of course, we did have three other cats, so I was like, well, I can't keep this kitten, but I'm gonna do what I can with this kitten. I was fortunate enough to find a home for the kitten because my neighbor knew somebody. So I called up that number that I had called for the other kitties, and I made sure that I got the voucher in. And after I got the voucher, of course, took him in. We got him neutered, and then he went to his forever home. After that, I just kind of got hooked and it's just kind of weird because, it seems like after that the kittens kind of found their way to me, so I found a few after that luckily they had more spay neuter programs come around, so I was able to get low cost spay neuter, and it was even less than I had paid a few years prior. So it was a really wonderful thing that these groups started in our area and these groups started all these low cost initiatives. I'm gonna try to start including a rescue story, the more positive things into some of these episodes. So I hope you enjoyed hearing that. If you would like to support us every single dollar helps our animals directly. You can find a link to donate in our show notes. Thanks for listening. And that's all the time we have for today's episode. If you are in animal rescue or if you know someone that has a story that should be told, please contact us. We would love to have you or them on the show. Thanks for listening, and please join us next week as we continue to explore the world of animal rescue.