Re: Not The Dreaded Cone!

my 15 year old cat had a cyst on her side removed. she had to wear the cone for 2 weeks. it was funny watching her try to go into small areas for the first few times. she couldn't use her kitty door or go under the futon either. since she wanted to lick the wound and i needed the door shut, i cut the top half of the cone off. it still had the one fastener and she couldn't get to the owwwwie. not nearly the number of ricochets - what fun is that?

Re: Not The Dreaded Cone!

I had an older female lab mix who in her late years got some sores on her belly and hind end. Needless to say, I did not want to put a cone on my sweet elderly Sheba so she would stop licking the medicine off. So....we put 'boy shorts', which we affectionately called them, on her. We still have the pictures and she looks sooo cute wearing them. They worked, with supervision of course. If we weren't there, she had figured out some way of getting them off!

Re: Not The Dreaded Cone!

Don't know about neuters as my adorable Ragdoll is a girl, but from others I hear & have seen pictures of an alternative to the cones That is baby or toddler tee shirts. Most seem to tolerate them much better. Have always heard the boys get over/recuperate much quicker than the girls who are spayed. Shorts sound cute also, if they can still do their business without interference or wiggling out of them. Hope all goes well - should be a short-lived inconvenience for that little guy.

Re: Not The Dreaded Cone!

When I spayed Shelby, he was around six months old. So he wouldn't feel pain, I asked the vet to give him a shot. When I got home I put him in his cat carrier for the two days and he wasn't licking that way. It worked for him and I'm going to do the same with Min-Jee when she's six months. I didn't have to worry about Bailey or Humphrey when it came to spaying and neutering because when I got them they were already fixed.

Re: Not The Dreaded Cone!

I have been very fortunate with my dogs so far, in that both Beau's and Taz's neuter surgeries went extremely well; the vets did great work, dissolving sutures were used both inside and out (which meant no return visits to get any stitches out) and there were never any problems with excessive licking of the incision sites, thus no "dreaded cones" were needed.

Both times, our wonderful vet told me not to worry if my dog licked at the area, and that as long as they didn't do TOO much licking or indulge in any vigorous exercise during the first couple of days after the operation, there would be nothing to worry about. Both times, he was right. After a few days, the incision site stopped bothering them, and I was able to keep them distracted enough during the first couple of days that they weren't able to spend much time "nursing" the wound.

A strange thing about dogs licking; the expression, "as clean as a hounds tooth," comes from the often-observed tendency of wounds which are licked by dogs to heal faster...isn't that weird? Centuries ago, people figured out that a hurt "kissed" by dogs heals faster and better, and so they believed that dogs had especially clean and beneficial mouths. Modern science has only borne out this belief by recently proving that dogs mouths are actually considerably cleaner and less bacteria-laden than our own mouths are!

So the next time someone complains about a dog wanting to lick them by pointing out "where the dogs mouth was recently," you can quote modern science as proof that dogs mouths are MUCH cleaner than our own mouths are! LOL!

Re: Not The Dreaded Cone!

Koty, my white schnauzer, is having a skin allergy problem right now. He is on med's and I am rinsing him several times a day. I've had to put children's crew socks on him to stop the toenails from cutting his skin when he scratches. I know it's not the same thing as the dreaded cone, but it affects him the same way....
It's both a little funny and a little sad when we have to resort to these things to "help them" :)