PET HEALTH
THE PERILS OF GRASS SEEDS
142 Preston Road, Yeovil Somerset BA20 2EE Lower Acreman Street Sherborne, Dorset DT9 3EX
By Peter Luscombe BVSc, PgC SAD, MRCVS
Grass seeds may look innocent enough, but they present a real danger to your dog. Problems are a common occurrence during the spring and summer months. While your pet explores the outdoors, grass seeds can easily brush off the tops of long grass stems onto their bodies. The seeds have pointed ends and are exceptionally sharp, so they become trapped in your pet’s fur and due to their barbed/arrow shape they can only travel in one direction. This means they can often penetrate skin or move into ears and cannot work their way back out. Breeds with hairy ears and hairy feet are more at risk if walked in meadows or woodlands where these grasses commonly grow in abundance. Grass seeds commonly get in between the toes of the dog's foot. Once attached to the surrounding soft feathery fur, the grass seed then makes its way towards the foot itself, easily penetrating the thin skin before starting to burrow deep into - and through - highly sensitive tissues of the foot resulting in pain, discomfort, infection, and sudden onset lameness.
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The second most common place for these seeds to cause problems is the ear canal. Their shape allows the grass seed to work its way from the fur around the ears down along the ear canal and come to rest right up against the delicate ear drum, causing sometimes extreme pain, irritation and, if untreated, infection. Other places can be at risk too, such as the eyes and skin folds. After 30 years of being a vet, I am still surprised where we can retrieve a grass seed from! Common signs to look for are sudden onset head shaking, paw licking, lameness, lethargy and signs of pain. If your dog is showing any of these signs, contact your vet immediately. Treatment often involves sedation or anaesthesia to explore the area and remove the seed with special forceps. If it has penetrated the skin, your dog may need surgical exploration of the area to search for the seed and flush the wound. However, once a grass seed has worked its way further into the body, they can be
much harder to find, don’t often show up on x-rays, and can start travelling around causing inflammation, infection and abscesses. On rare occasions, repeat surgeries are needed to locate these troublesome seeds. Prevention, as always, is the best cure. Try to keep your pet away from long grassy areas since the seeds can catch onto their coat, skin or toes very easily. If you take your pet outdoors for a walk, check their fur for any grass seeds when you get home. The typical areas to check are eyes, ears, nose, armpits and their toes. Keep long-haired dogs trimmed or clipped and well groomed, especially around their feet and ears. If you are concerned that your pet may have picked up a grass seed, please get in touch – the earlier grass seeds are found, the less damage they can cause.
THE SMALL PEARL-BORDERED FRITILLARY Here is another of our once common butterflies captured locally by our nature photographer Colin Lawrence. This butterfly is sadly now on the UK threatened red list.
Colin’s tip is to look carefully for this small butterfly about this time of year in damp, grassy habitats and also in woodland clearings and moorland. The adults will be stopping to nectar on bramble and
thistle flowers and will be laying its next brood typically on dog violet and marsh violet which is the food plant for the next generation of caterpillars.
The small pearl-bordered fritillary is a beautiful orange butterfly with black marks on the upper side of the wings. It has black and silver markings on its underside, along with a row of white 'pearls' on the outer edge of the wing. Some have likened the underside to a stained glass church window! Due to modern agriculture practices, most of the grassland habitats that sustained these butterflies have been lost to intensive farming. Because of this, the small pearlbordered fritillary has seen a serious drop in population across Europe, in some places as much as 80%. Despite modern conservation efforts, the number of small pearl-bordered fritillaries is still declining. 44
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