dog has two cuts, bleeding

Question
My 13-year old Lhasa Apso has two cuts on her body - one on her side, about mid-torso, another near her leg on the her other side. She is shacking and totally still, will not walk of move at all. When we try to pick her up she tries to bite us. Our house backs up to a park and she was alone for a few hours this afternoon. We have foxes, coyotes, joggers and teenagers that cruise around behind our house. We have never had a problem with wildlife getting into our yard, but we are wondering if someone might have shot her with a beebee gun? Or could a fox have tried to chomp on her? She weighs about 12 lbs., so I'm sure a coyote would have finished her off. What do you think? She bleeds when we wash the wounds, but then the bleeding kind of stops... We put Neosporin on the wound, it's not that big. What should we do?

Answer
Joni,

Wounds like this need medical attention.  They may need stitches or they may just need cleaning and antibiotics and pain control.  Puncture wounds, especially, can be very dangerous because the wound you see is just the tip of the iceberg and neosporin just doesn't work.

In most cases of trauma, unless someone saw the incident, we usually never know what happened.  My head nurse brought her cat in the other day covered in wounds and very painful.  We have no idea what happened to him and he wasn't talking!  So, unfortunately, there is very little chance of you finding out what happened unless you can find a witness to the even (a 2 legged one anyway!)

I've learned in veterinary medicine to mostly give up finding "causes" of things and just treat them as I see them.  Please, if you haven't so far take your dog to your veterinarian to get her on some medicine, not only from the pain but also for the infection that could be happening.