Puppy Teeth

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that Reyna had a puncture wound on her side, near the base of her rib cage. It didn’t seem to be bothering her much, I didn’t think a lot of it. I figured that Duncan had done it during one of their play fights, and that it would heal up on its own. As the days passed, I noticed it didn’t seem to be healing, but it still wasn’t bothering Reyna very much. When I got home from work yesterday, though, I saw that she had ripped out all the fur around that area – about the size of a quarter – and that the area was red and ugly-looking. Even more significant was the fact that she did not like me messing with it. So, I called the vet and scheduled an appointment for this morning. The vet wasn’t too concerned at first, until he realized the wound had been there for more than two weeks.

My brother, John, had dinner with me last night, and shortly before he left, he noticed Reyna was playing with something. His first thought was that it looked like a dog’s toenail, but when he showed it to me, I thought it looked like a tooth. I checked both dogs, but didn’t see any holes that suggested a tooth was missing. I put it in my bag to take to the vet’s, to see what he thought.

This morning, when we got to the vet’s office, he said the thing was definitely a tooth, and looked like a puppy canine that had been pulled out by the roots. He checked Reyna’s mouth, and then looked at her wound. He then went outside and checked Duncan’s mouth. There’s a small red spot behind the new adult canine that shows where the puppy tooth used to be. The vet said that, the way the tooth looked, there would be a distinct hole where it had been pulled out, but Duncan’s mouth was fine. He also said a hole like that would take a couple of weeks to fully heal.

So, Duncan gave Reyna a puncture wound when they were playing a few weeks ago, and an upper puppy canine tooth was ripped out near the roots during the incident. The tooth stayed in Reyna’s side until last night. The vet figures it had started working its way out, and that’s why she went nuts with the area yesterday. The tooth either popped out, or she managed to finally work it out on her own. This is not something that I would ever have thought could happen. Of course, I also didn’t think my dog would manage to nearly slice her tail off on some random thing out in the yard, either.