How To Clean Your Dog's Ears Like A PRO! | Veterinarian Demonstrates

Good morning everyone, my name is Dr. Piet. I'm a veterinarian from South Africa, and joining me today is Kissings, my patient, and Dr. Annarine, my wife. She's also a vet. So today we're gonna demonstrate how to clean a dog's ears the proper way. So usually when your dog starts scratching his ears, shaking his head, and you've got this foul-smelling discharge that almost smells like corn chips, it can generally be an indication that there's something funky going on inside the ears. So at the veterinary clinic, we would prefer to look inside the ear using this tool. It's called an otoscope. It's basically just a magnifying glass with a light attached to it, and this little nozzle that we can insert into the ear canal to look for any signs of inflammation, any lesions, and most importantly, to see whether or not the eardrum is intact, as this will kind of determine the way that we want to treat the ear infection. Now I also made another in-depth video on ear infections that you can watch as well, but for today's video, I'm just gonna show you how to clean the ear and kind of how to approach this. So as I've mentioned, we'll look into the ear to see if there's any signs of inflammation. So basically, you'd prefer to have an assistant to just calm the dog and to rub the head and just to make the dog feel safe. Otherwise, this can sometimes stress them out a bit and they will start running around, and we want to keep them as stress-free as possible in these situations. So what we will do, for example, we will lift the ear, we'll insert the otoscope into the ear canal, and then just look through the magnifying glass if we see any abnormalities. Very importantly, before doing this, we would ideally want to disinfect the nozzle as well as when we move in between ears. Okay, so if everything seems fine, we're gonna proceed to cleaning the ear. So in order to understand what we are trying to achieve with cleaning the ear, we need to have a bit of an idea of what the anatomy looks like. So when we look at the model of the ear, we'll see that the ear meets the outside of the ear canal. This moves down vertically, forms this acute angle, and then goes again horizontally. So if you just insert the fluid when the ear is relaxed like this, the fluid won't go too deep. It will stop around there, and that's not ideal because we would like the fluid to penetrate all the way to the end in order to give the maximum cleaning effect. So the best way to achieve this is to just grab the ear at the base, lift it up, and then this will cause this acute angle to straighten up a bit, which will allow the fluid to go much deeper and therefore to optimize the cleaning effect. All right, so now we're gonna clean Cassinx's ears. Ideally, you would want to put on gloves because it is a bit of a yucky procedure. And then what I like to do is to break the cotton wool into little pieces, little round blobs that we use to clean out the ears. And then what we prefer to use is this veterinary-specific ear cleanser. And the way that this works is you basically just twist open the nozzle and that will allow the fluid to go out. It's very important to always clean the nozzle in between the dogs to make sure that you don't spread any infection. And then as mentioned earlier, we'll grab the ear, lift it up a bit to open the ear canal, and that will give us the best way to penetrate as deep as possible. Then we open the nozzle and we insert the nozzle into the ear. And then don't insert it too deep into the ear as that is painful. You basically just need to get into the ear canal and then give a good squirt to get enough fluid inside. See, okay, okay. Then after that, we just give it a gentle massage. If you listen closely, you'll start hearing this shush, shush, shush sound. This is basically just the ear cleanser breaking up the wax and the dirt inside the ear. And it's a good way to just get deep into there and to rub it out. So as you can see, the technique that I'm using is I'm rubbing in a circular motion, starting at the deep end and then rubbing more upwards. This will ensure that we rub all the dirt from the deep end up to the superficial end, which will make it a bit easier to clean later on. Okay, so after a while, when we're done, we can use one of these cotton swabs, put it around your finger and then just insert it into the ear. Again, don't press it too deep and don't rub too hard. We basically just want to absorb all the muck and dirt that we just loosened up in the ear and then we look at the color. So in this case, it's a bit dirty. It's normal for a dog, yes. And if you see any blood or darkish black dirt, that would be indication that there's something bigger going on. And then usually we want to repeat this process until we get to a point where the cotton balls that we insert comes out clear, meaning that the ear canal is clean. So just gonna repeat this again. And you'll sometimes notice that it is a bit uncomfortable to them because the fluid is cold, but generally after doing this a couple of times, they should get used to it and it will become a bit easier. And then after repeating this a couple of times, you'll notice that when you clean the ear, it will turn out to be pretty much clear. That's kind of indication that the ears are clean now and you don't have to continue moving forward. And then after that, there's still a bit of fluid inside the ears. So what we would like to do is to put the dog down on the floor and then let him just shake all of the excess fluid out. Okay, Kissings. Okay, okay. Okay, so that was basically how you clean a dog's ears. Again, please make sure to go watch my video on ear infections in dogs after this video, where I go into a bit more detail as to what causes ear infections, how it can be treated, and the ways that it can be prevented. In any case, thank you for watching this video. If you found any value in it, please leave a like on this video and let me know down in the comments what type of demo videos in dogs you would like me to do next. And as always, have a lekker day and I'll see you in another video next week. Cheers.