broken duclaw! help!

Arrrgh dew claws the bane of active animals. I know many still keep them but most of my fellow RR breeders argee they are pretty useless and a hazzard.  The few breeders i know who argue in favor of them think they are still a functioning didgit.  not on my pack so at 3 days each puppy is handed to our awesome vet who removes them and then they go back home ot momma, they never remember having had them.

But you asked what should you do for poor little Zoey, First watch out for infection. If your vet is closed and you need to avoid the er vet  I'd reccommend  cleaning the area , first with warm water , then hydrogrn peroxide, pack the base area with any decent triple antibiotic and a gauze pad over that, wrap it firmly but not tooo tightly and get her to the vet asap. If she continues to bother it tape a sock over the foot and leg allowing her to mess with the sock instead. Good Luck and let us know how she is doing!!

Bonita of Bwana

 well i WOULD like to eventually get her into some sort of sport (agility, rally-o, flyball, etc) she is a JRT, so i need to burn off some of that energy somehow!! lol .... so i would just as rather leave them on. it IS the first time she's had a problem with one, so i'm not jumping to anything yet.

 update:

Zoey took some antibiotics just as a precaution, and i put a little iodine on it (once) and eventually it just cleared itself up. i don't even know if it was infected, i dont think very much if any.

she's back to running around like crazy, and it doesn't bother her for us to touch it anymore.

thanks for all the advice everyone! i love to come on here and get help when i need it :)

~V and Zoey~
 

Rally definitely doesn't use a dewclaw. The dog moves at the handler's pace, in rally. It is fantastic for Emma, though. She is very stimulated by the mental aspect of it. There are jumps, but for a dog under 15", the jump is only 8" high. 

River dosen't have duclaws they were removed as a pup before he came home with me.  But he broke a nail not to long ago, right up the middle.  It was horrible and took weeks to finally heal and three Vet follow ups.  The Vet trimmed it as much as he could and then crazy glued it each time, the quik was exposed and was sore and would bleed.  He kept catching it on things and making it bleed again and make him limp.  I felt so bad for him during a long time of healing...   he was also put on meds for infection, just in case.  If there is a way to prevent that type of injury I would diffiently look into it.

Dewclaws, another one of those things I'll never really understand when it comes to removing body parts. But I'll leave that alone. What I will mention, is that in 12-15 years of breeding working Labs - out in the field, brush, mess - we've never had a dog remove a dewclaw. In my family's Mini Schnauzers now, we do not remove dewclaws, even though it's something almost all breeders do at birth. We refuse to do it. And to be honest, not once have we, or anybody we've sold puppies to, ever had a dewclaw injury problem. And with the other breeds we've had, that all had dewclaws - Cairn, Sheltie, Pap, Shih Tzu mix, etc - never a problem.

We've only ever had two toenail injuries. One was on a right rear foot, last nail on the inside - completely torn out. The other was a front right foot, second toenail in, broken off partway and left exposed. My point here being, that toenail injuries can happen to ANY toe, not just the dewclaw. And in my experience, they are statistically not any more likely to be injured than any other. The reason they tend to get injured more is lack of care in keeping them short enough since they don't tend to wear down like the other nails do.

Dogs do use their dewclaws a lot, for more than most people realize. For steering, gripping, holding things with their feet. I couldn't imagine ever having another dog without them.

Now, if your dog is repeatedly injuring it, then by all means it would be most humane to remove that one to ease the dog's suffering. If it was one injury, and the toenail wasn't permanently damaged, I wouldn't jump to remove it. It's definitely not cause to remove both automatically, and I would personally never remove them from pups as a "just in case". If that was the problem I'd be removing all of their toenails, since they only problems I have had were non-dews, and that of course is just really silly.

Hope your pup feels better, nail injuries in general aren't fun.