Pet Care Tips- How to clean your dog’s ears

Hi, this is Paul Wise and welcome to the LawnVets video series.

In this short video I will be sharing with you some tips on how to performa procedure on your pet.

To ensure the safety of you and your pet, I recommend if you’venot already done so that you first watch our Animal Handling video.

Ok so we’re going to demonstrate how toclean ears, there are specific reasons why you might want to clean a dog’s ears, andprincipally that reason is because the ear is dirty, but what I wouldn’t suggest youdo is don’t clean an ear that’s infected, because you’re probably not going to doa whole lot of good, so very important before you’re using ear cleaners that we’ve hada little look-see at the patient, so come here for an examination first, so we can popthe auriscope down, make sure that the ears are suitable for an ear cleaner and that youdon’t need a medicated prep.

If we have had a look and we’ve decided that ear cleaningis appropriate then what tends to happen is we tend to get wax and debris and I’m justgoing to use the wellington boot as a model for a dog’s ear, there’s a vertical partto the dog’s ear which goes down the side of the face, so that bit there, and then itgoes in underneath the skull so that’s kind of analogous to this area of the wellingtonboot here and the ear drum’s all the way down here.

Now muck and debris tends to accumulatein this horizontal section so to clean an ear out effectively we’ve got to deliverthe drop, the ear cleaner, down into this deep part of the ear, so you usually do needto actually insert the nozzle to actually achieve that.

First things first, I’m justgoing to moisten a little bit of cotton wool with the ear cleaner, and then we’re justgoing to pop this into Dougie’s ear, and squeeze gently just to deliver some ear cleanerinto it, little massage when we’ve done that, so in we go, there’s a little holeup there, whoops sorry Dougie, little squeeze, take it out, massage and you might hear asquelching sound when you do this, oh that’s good isn’t it, yes, ok and then we’lllet him shake his head if he wants to shake his head, he may or may not, and he’s notgoing to, typically most dogs do and then you can just take this cotton wool and youcan wipe away any muck that comes up like that, and obviously you may need to repeatthis process if the ears are particularly dirty but bear in mind as I said, it’s veryimportant that we’ve examined those ears first.

Don’t habitually clean ears, somedogs’ ears don’t actually need it, and as I said in some instances it may be betterto have that medicated ear prep if your dog’s ears are infected.

As always, if having watched this video youhave any questions or if you encounter any difficulties performing the procedure, thenplease phone or email the surgery.

We’re here to personally help give you the verybest advice and treatment possible for your much loved pet.

Thanks for watching, any feedbackregarding this video will be very much appreciated.