Lots of people have relaxing Sunday mornings - lying in bed, reading the news or a good book. Slowly enjoying their cup of tea or coffee, maybe making a big weekend breakfast. What do we do? Deal with a dangling bunny dewclaw.
Maizie, our free ranging house rabbit, needed his claws trimmed. I wielded the dog nail clippers while my husband held the rabbit in his lap, covering his eyes with a towel to help keep him calm. (The rabbit's eyes, not my husband's.) I always worry about cutting the "quick", both on my rabbit and on my dogs. It is the part of the nail containing live blood vessels and WILL bleed if you cut it. I cut all of the nails on the first paw just fine; then Maizie jumped and pulled his paw back. We rearranged and as I went for the next paw, I saw blood on the towel. "Oh, #$%^!" was exclaimed, as the little babe sitting beside me took in all of the excitement. As I moved onto the next paw, just trying to get it quickly done with, my husband realized that the blood was coming from Maizie's dewclaw, not one of the nails that I had trimmed. The dewclaw was dangling loose, looking like it was barely hanging on. I don't do well with blood and so started freaking out. So much for teaching the little babe to remain calm during an emergency. I grabbed the cornstarch, which helps to stop the bleeding. I keep both the cornstarch and the powdered sugar in unlabeled glass mason jars, so I had to do a quick taste test to make sure I had the right one. I then poured some cornstarch on a damp paper towel and pressed it onto the nail.
So what should we do? Call an old petsitting client of mine who used to have 7 rabbits? Call our petsitter? I decided to do what anybody else would do in this modern age - I jumped online and Googled "torn rabbit dewclaw". As I was reading out loud from the first website I found, "loose dewclaw, blood, oh, gross, this rabbit's dewclaw just fell right off", my husband said, "it just fell right off". "What do you mean it fell off?" "It fell off - he pulled it off." Sure enough, there was the dewclaw on the floor, just like on the website. Gross.
The rabbit on the other website survived the ordeal and did not bleed to death, so we decided to just let him be. Maizie started licking it right away and seemed fine. I'm sure it hurt a bit, but he didn't seem fazed. I'm glad that I wasn't the one that caused the bleeding, though maybe if his dewclaw had been trimmed shorter in the first place, it might not have snagged on the towel. It will be interesting to see if the nail grows back.
I cleaned up the blood, threw away the dewclaw, the little babe gave Maizie a slice of apple, and we continued our morning.
I shared this post on The Self Sufficient HomeAcre for the HomeAcre Hop.