Blood-sucking beauties

My friend swears blind that he has heard of leeches being used to treat dogs. He is having a laugh, isn’t he?

Neil says: Nope. Your friend is quite right. We recently had a working dog that had been caught in a fence for a while. The wire had tightened above her hock, cutting off the blood supply to her foot, which was cold and senseless. Leeches are available, which arrive in the post packaged in gel to protect them. These are then moved into distilled water — chlorinated water kills them. We attached three leeches to her foot, which fed for around half an hour, growing in size as they did so and sucking blood into the area. When they detached, bleeding continued for a few hours. The process was repeated the next day with fresh leeches and the blood supply recovered very well. I do believe those leeches saved the dog’s foot.