Expert: Jana Connell RVT, CVT - 10/19/2011

Question
I have a year old hunting dog and I'll start off by saying he's very loved and spoiled! I do use him for field trials so I run him about every week in fox pens. Until his left eye started looking cloudy and it was irritating him. I put stuff in his eye and some antibiotics. Within the next two days it started clearing up. I ran him two days after that. I brought him home and he was fine. Later that day, his right paw was swollen, not his leg, just his paw. He also had three lumps on his back. This older guy said it looked like a snake bite and to give him penicillin. So I did that. The next day his paw was back to normal, one of the lumps completely disappeared. The other two had gone down a good bit. Now it has been a week and those two lumps have not gone down since then. They don't bother him at all. He's eating normal and acting normal. If it doesn't go down by this weekend, I'm bringing him to the vet. I'm just curious as to what could have caused the lumps and why they won't go down. Does it have to do with his eye? Or giving him the two shots back to back? Anything will help satisfy my questions. Thank you for your time!

Answer
Well it's pretty hard for me to tell you since I am not there and cannot see them, but it's a good chance that the lumps are from the injections.

Giving penicillin randomly like that is going to come back and bite him in the butt someday because he is going to develop a resistance to it. You cannot just give a shot here and there of antibiotics.

That is why we have 'superbugs' that these drugs won't kill now. So please re-think your methods of dosing him now and then with these injections.
Then again, even if they are not from the injections, you cannot keep dosing him like this off and on.

There are a zillion things that could be causing these lumps so it's best if you do have your vet look at it.

And snake bite doesn't heal up overnight like that. More likely he got something in it, or he bruised it badly running and it swelled up.

Running dogs in rice paddies will cause a lot of problems so if you do that make sure he is wearing leather pad boots.