As a pet first aider, it's very useful to know where parts of the body are on your animal
so that you can discuss that with whoever you are speaking to, whether it be a vet or
a nurse or somebody else when you're trying to explain where an injury may have occurred.
So we will just go through where certain parts of the anatomy are.We start with the head.
The nose of the dog is called the nose, and then the rest of this is the muzzle over the
top of the nose there, and up to the top of the head. Obviously, we have the mouth, upper
jaw, lower jaw so you can name where the injury may have occurred.Different dogs have slightly
different anatomy. They all have noses. They all have muzzles, but they may be of varying
lengths, varying widths and that does make a difference as to whether they're more likely
to get injuries on those parts of the body. Ears are also very different from dog to dog.
Some ears may be quite upright and then other dogs, like Elsa the Labrador, they have floppy
ears; so they come down. And then you have dogs like Bassets which have very long floppy
ears. Again, that can mean that there may be different types of problems associated
with whatever type of ear that your dog may have.Coming down from the back of their heads,
we come to the neck and then the back of the dog. The different breeds have different size
necks and different lengths of back to the length of the leg, and that again can make
a difference as to what kind of injuries they are more susceptible to. So with a large breed,
like Elsa, everything is in a nice proportion; nice long spine, long neck and long legs.
Coming down to the legs, we have the shoulder, so you will often be able to feel the spine
of the shoulder on an animal. On cats and dogs, rabbits, whatever breed it is, you should
be able to feel that nice spine of the scapula, of the shoulder.The shoulder joint is here
on a dog; so quite forwards. And then we have the elbow, which is here. The point of the
elbow is a really useful point of location for finding other parts on the chest which
we will come into when we are talking about CPR. The forearm is this part of the leg and
then we come down to what we would know as the wrist, but in an animal, this is called
the carpus. Their carpus or carpi are quite upright because they are four-legged animals,
they walk on all four legs, so their feet are very much planted and upright.We then
come down to the foot. Dogs and cats will have five digits. You sometimes find in certain
breeds that they won't have a dewclaw, which is this nail here, and that might be because
they were born without a dewclaw or it may be that they had their dewclaws removed as
a puppy for medical reasons, in most cases. As you can see with Elsa her dewclaw is still
there and she has the four toes as well. The dewclaw varies. It can be very dangly and
wobbly and then has a greater chance of being caught and ripped, and then with other dogs,
it's very well attached to the side of the foot. And actually, it's much safer up there
because it's at less chance of being broken.Coming down the body, we have the chest, 13 ribs
and the back rib back here is what's called a floating rib, so it only goes halfway down.
But when you feel back, you will feel all those ribs. You can count them in a lot of
animals if they are the right weight and condition, and then you will feel the point of that last
rib. The sternum is the bone that runs down the centre of where the ribs join the base
of the rib cage, and that you should be able to feel the point at the front and then at
the back. Standing up, we have the back legs. So it's useful to know the points of the back
legs so that you can name them and discuss them, if you are needing to speak to a vet
about where an injury has occurred or where a cut may be, because it helps them decide
potentially what the damage could be and maybe how quickly you need to be seen. So the hip
is up here. If you pull the leg back you should be able to feel the hip just moving underneath
your hand there, and that's a lovely hip there.Coming down, we have the thigh muscle, and then we
come to the knee. So in a dog or a cat, the knee is called the stifle; that's the reference
point that most vets would call it. Further down we have the ankle, what we would call
the ankle. On an animal, this is what we call the hock. From the hock, you can feel these
long bones, which would be equal to the long bones that we have in our feet, obviously
not our hands, but these bones that run along here, much longer in animals, and then again
the foot. And on the back feet of animals, they tend to only have the four digits rather
than the five like we do. We then have the tail. Again, in some dogs, you will find that
they don't have a tail because it would have been docked for health reasons, medical reasons,
safety reasons or in some breeds they just have very short or stumpy tails, that's what
they are born with.