Your dog's choking and they cannot breathe, what do you do? If your first thought was to panic, then you need to watch this video. Now this video is for dogs that are experiencing a complete obstruction, meaning they cannot breathe at all, and signs of this will be a look of sheer panic on your dog's face. They generally will have their eyes very wide, they'll have their mouth open but no air will be able to get in or out. It's actually silent. It can be very, very frightening to see, and they're often pouring at their face frantically as well. So if you see your dog is choking, you're going to want to take a look inside their mouth as best possible. Try and open up their mouth, take care not to get bitten. When dogs are in this state of choking, they are very, very distressed and panicking, so often people do get bitten in these scenarios. So try and take a look in their mouth. If you can see an object that's relatively near the front, you can try and get your finger in behind it and pull it out of the way. However, if you see that there's an object quite far at the back of the throat, you don't want to be sticking your whole hand in there trying to grab it because the chances are you're going to end up pushing it even further back down the airway. If let's say there's a ball that's stuck in the airway, what you can do is place the dog on their back and extend their neck, and from the outside using your two thumbs, place your thumbs on the bottom underneath their jaw and you can push up and out and try to push that ball out from the outside. If there is something sharp like a stick stuck in the airway, do not use this technique of pushing it up from the outside because you might risk causing more damage. Now if you still can't get the item out, what you can do is try and hold the dog up in like a wheelbarrow position to try and let gravity help dislodge the object. And what you can also do is whilst they're standing is five back slaps between the shoulder blades, exactly the same in humans. You want to try and dislodge that object. And if that even doesn't work, then you can go into the Heimlich maneuver. And to do this, you want to sit the dog upright with their spine in line with your spine, and you want to make a fist and place that fist under their sternum. So it's just on this sort of dip in their belly right below their rib cage. You want to place your fist in there, place your other hand at the back of your fisted hand and you want to pull in and up. So in and up. And you can do this five times. Now it's not like in the movies where the object will fly out of the mouth. What you need to do is occasionally check in the mouth, has it dislodged the object, obviously still taking care trying not to get bitten. Can you see that object? Can you now get your finger in there, get behind it and pull it out? Now if let's just say you've got a giant breed dog, you've got a Great Dane or something and there is absolutely no way you're going to be able to lift that dog up and give it the Heimlich maneuver, what you can do is try and get them laying on their side and at the widest part of their rib cage, so generally there's a bit of a dome here behind the elbow. What you can do is place both of your hands flat on top of that dome and give a one strong compression. So you're going to want to go like that. You do it once, check in the mouth. Can you see, has it dislodged that object? If not, again, you can do this up to five times, one compression. We're not going into CPR. What we're trying to do here is push the air to force that object out of the airway. And every time you do that, you need to be checking, has that item dislodged? In the process of all this going on, you really need to try and phone your vet for advice as well, because if your dog has got a complete obstruction, you are very much against the clock at this stage. So the vet will also give you advice on the phone of what to do. Now if you do successfully manage to dislodge the object from the airway and get it clear, you want to get your dog to the vets as soon as possible for a checkup. But if you manage to clear the airway and your dog is collapsed, they're not breathing, they don't have a pulse, then you're going to want to go straight into CPR. I have another video on CPR for for dogs over 7 kilos and under 7 kilos, so please make sure that you check both of those out as well.
