Animals – Grass seed struggles

We’re halfway through summer and I’m sure your dogs are happily gallivanting through the bush and enjoying their summer. However, the smallest little grass seed can cause a surprisingly huge amount of grief for your pup! With summer and early spring, we tend to see long grasses thriving, especially in the north. Besides grass and pollen allergies, the little grass seed heads they produce have a sharp arrow-head point that can do quite a bit of damage. The seeds of these long grasses such as barley grass or needle grass can easily penetrate through skin, and many of them have tiny barbs that prevent them from falling back out. They can cause painful open wounds and when in the body, they can cause an infection with bacteria, either as an open infected wound or an abscess that forms around the foreign material.

Most commonly, we see them around the toes, arm pits, mouth and ears, but once lodged into the skin, they can migrate anywhere in the body. They can present starting with an itchy, painful area on the skin with tiny red puncture holes, or an inflamed lump between the toes or affected area. If it has punctured the foot, it can also cause sudden lameness in your pet.

We have been seeing an increase in the number of these cases through summer, with them mostly occurring between the toes. I had one severe case in one poor dog of multiple seed wounds under both armpits. I have had a colleague’s dog even have a grass seed migrate into its chest cavity from a seed that punctured the skin on its side.

The best treatment is prevention, where possible, to avoid letting your dog run through long grass with seeding heads. However, if they go bashing through the paddock, make sure to give their hair coat and feet a thorough check after their walk and pluck out any seeds attached to their fur.

However, if you suspect a grass seed infection and bring your pup to the vet, the treatment will depend on severity. If caught early, we can usually remove grass seeds either while they are still conscious or under light sedation, and provide medications for relief. If a little abscess has already formed, it would usually warrant a full sedation to lance and drain the abscess. We would often also explore the wound to see if we can find the seed. However, because of how small they are and the possibility of migration, these are often not successfully found. We then would have to treat the infection in the meantime, and wait for an abscess to form elsewhere, or hope that the grass seed had managed to be removed on its own. If the grass seed has migrated much deeper into the body, causing illness and a deeper infection, further diagnostics would be needed to locate the foreign seed and exploratory surgery under general anaesthetic would probably need to be undertaken.