Itchy feet in dogs are common in summer
Tag, a five year old terrier, always comes to see me in late July. His owner would prefer that he didn’t come to see me, but she can’t do much about it.
Tag, in his own way, tells her that he needs to go to the vet. How does he do this? He starts to chew his feet.
He doesn’t just have an occasional nibble. He starts by licking them after his morning walk. Then he progresses from licking to using his teeth to bite his feet now and again. Before long, he’s indulging in full scale chewing, and he clearly hurts himself, because he whimpers as he bites the undersides of his own feet.
When Tag did this for the first time, as a two year old dog, I hoped that it might be a one-off. Sometimes a dog stands on something irritant (such as a patch of nettles) that makes their feet temporarily itchy. They start to lick and chew their feet in response to this itchiness, and in doing this, they damage their feet even more. If you’ve ever scratched a mosquito bite you’ll know the sequence of events: rubbing an itchy area feels good at first, but it actually makes things worse in the medium term, because the act of rubbing irritates the healthy skin around the initial sore area. You can imagine that when dogs get stuck in with their teeth, the damage that they can do to themselves is immense.
In that first year, I gave Tag the standard treatment for itchy feet. First, I did a simple skin scrape to ensure that he wasn’t harbouring parasitic mites that might have started the itch in the first place. Once I’d ruled mites out, I gave him anti-inflammatory medication, in the form of steroid tablets. These took away the redness and itchiness from his feet, so that he no longer wanted to lick and chew them. And once he left his feet alone, Tag’s soon returned to normal.
I initially gave him a two week course of treatment. If there had been a one-off initial cause of itchiness (such as nettles), this would have been sufficient. As it was, within a few days of the medication stopping, Tag’s feet became itchy again.Within a week, his feet were as red and sore as they had been at the start. I knew, once this happened, that the original cause of Tag’s itchy feet was still around. It wasn’t nettles (as his owner had been keeping him well away from these). There was only one likely cause: an allergy to some other type of vegetation that Tag was coming into contact with.
There’s a long list of possibilities: various types of grasses, pollens and other plants. Tag’s owner told me that there was no way that she could keep him away from underfoot plants: he had to be taken for his daily walks, and there wasn’t enough tarmac in her area to exercise him on that. So how could I help him?
There are two ways of dealing with this common type of problem. First, find another way of limiting Tag’s contact with vegetation, and second, use longer term anti-inflammatory medication to dampen down his reaction to it.
I supplied Tag with some special doggy boots: they attach with Velcro around his ankles, preventing the soles of his feet from contacting the ground. Unfortunately they didn’t even last for the duration of one walk: Tag insisted on taking them off.
The next way to limit his contact with vegetation was to get Tag’s owner to wash his feet after every walk. She started to keep a basin of water at the back door, and after every walk, his feet were dunked in the basin and she swilled the water around this toes, rinsing his feet. The idea is that any traces of the vegetation causing the allergy would be removed before he had time to have a severe allergic reaction. This regular washing did help a bit, but Tag continued to lick his feet more than normal.
It was time for the other option: regular anti-inflammatory tablets. Tag was started onto a low dose of steroids, given every second day. This was enough to solve the issue: his repetitive foot-chewing stopped completely. Tag stayed on these tablets for the rest of the summer. As Autumn approached, his owner first reduced, then stopped the tablets: Tag didn’t start chewing his feet again.
As autumn moved to winter, Tag stayed healthy, and we began to hope that his problem might have been cured forever. It wasn’t to be: he was fine all winter and spring, but the following summer, at exactly the same time in late July, Tag started itching his feet. This time we knew exactly what to do: his owner started the daily foot washing, and I prescribed enough anti-inflammatory medication to get him through the summer. The same pattern has now been repeated four times: every July, the offending vegetation must sprout, and Tag starts to itch. His owner knows the routine well at this stage: a quick visit to the vet to make sure that there’s nothing else going on, and then onto his usual summer foot-washing and tablet taking routine.
Every year we hope that maybe it won’t happen again. So far, we’ve been disappointed. But maybe - just maybe - this is the year. As the days of July are ticked off the calendar, we are hoping that at last, this might be the year when simple homefoot washing might be enough to stop him getting itchy. Time will soon tell!