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Repair of Gopher Tortoise shell

22 16:00:55

Question
A Gopher Tortoise wandered into my dog pen area and unfortunately was attacked by my very large mutt dog. Her shell in the front is chewed/scraped, not cracked or punctured. It did bleed. Underneath appears cracked. I brought her in (last evening) and applied Hydrogen Peroxide to all bleeding areas, waited 10 minutes and then rinsed all sand, etc away. I reapplied hydrogen peroxide and put her in a box in a dark, quite area. This morning she is not bleeding, but the scrapes are definitely deep and I don't want to release her until I can cover the areas to keep infection out. What could I possibly use? Wish I had some of the fake skin the hospitals use. How about a liquid Band-Aid?

Answer
If you could hold on to her for a while longer that would be best. Simply covering the problem with a bandage of sorts wont work, wild animals have a way of getting into spots where anything you put on them will simply be knocked off. If you can hold on to her and watch out for her till there appears to be some healing, that would be excellent. Turtle shells do not heal very well, in the sense that they do not regenerate. I would wait and see what happens in a few days.