Under no circumstance or condition should you cut your dog’s quick. This would not only cause your dog pain and agony, but it will also lead to your dog bleeding profusely for a long time as dog blood does not have the ability of clotting like human blood does. A dog bleeding from the quick is something that should be treated immediately as delay can lead to other more serious health problems.
Determining whether your Dog’s Nails Are Too Long.
Basically, there are simple things you should watch out for in your dog to show whether their nails have grown too long. Is there that clicking sound on the floor whenever your dog walks by? Does your dog look uncomfortable when walking? Almost as if he or she is agonizing. These are simple signs that your dog’s nail might be overgrown.
Some effects of nails that are too long in a dog are:
i. The dog’s walk will be irregular and not in step or rhythm.
ii. The dog may bleed from the nails or be suffering from some infection as a result of injury from the nails.
iii. The dog will start having discomfort in the toe joint and paw pads, this can lead to skeletal abnormalities
iv. Constant knocking on the floor will lead to the nails fracturing easily as they become frail over time.
v. The dog will avoid hard and slippery surfaces.
This means you should cut the overgrown nails to size immediately, right? Wrong, you do not cut an overgrown nail short at once, you do it a little at a time. If you don’t, there is a high possibility of cutting your dog’s quick, and as we said earlier, “dog quick bleeding” is an emergency situation.
In fact, it is always advised to get the help of a vet doctor or better still a dog groomer to shorten your dog’s nails, especially when you are going to do it for the first time. They would usually try to identify where the quick currently is as that would determine how far you can cut or shorten your dog’s nails and do so without the “dog nail quick bleeding”
For light-colored dog nails, it is usually easy to locate the position of the quick by raising the paws up into the light. For dark-colored dog nails, there is a special lighting which most dog groomers have to view the position of the dog’s quick.
If “cutting the quick on a dog” is possible due to a dog’s nail growing, it also means that the quick grew as the nails grow, this begs the question WHY DOES THE QUICK GROW TOGETHER WITH THE NAIL“
The answer is simple the dog’s nails need the growth of the quick to signal that it is ok to continue its growth. The longer the nails the more the quick grows to nourish and lend to sensitivity in that region. The opposite of the above scenario is