Health & Medical

Late July, a field of dry barley stubble, and by the evening my terrier was chewing at her front paw and would not stop. There was nothing to see. Not a cut, not a thorn, no swelling, just a dog worrying at one spot between two toes like it owed her money.

Three days later there was a hole with pus coming out of it and a vet was digging a grass seed out from two centimetres inside her foot.

Grass seeds, the barley and foxtail sort with the arrow-shaped head and the backward-facing barbs, are built to travel one direction only. They are designed to work into soil. What they cannot do is reverse. So a seed that gets caught in the fur between a dog's toes gets pushed inward by every step, works through the skin, and then keeps going, and the barbs mean it cannot come back out the way it went in. Some migrate remarkable distances. Vets pull them out of chest cavities.

Between the toes is the commonest entry point by a distance. Ears are second, then eyes, then up the nose, then armpits and the folds of skin behind a front leg.

What each one looks like

A paw seed shows as sudden obsessive licking or chewing of one foot, often with a limp that comes and goes. Within a day or two there may be a small firm swelling between the toes, then a weeping hole. The dog was fine in the morning and fixated by teatime, and that suddenness is the clue that separates it from an allergy, which builds slowly and usually involves more than one foot.

An ear seed is unmistakable and awful to watch. Violent head shaking, tilting to one side, pawing at the ear, sometimes crying out. It happens on a walk and the dog is distressed within minutes because the seed is touching the eardrum. This one is an emergency the same day, not the next morning.

An eye seed sits behind the lid and produces a suddenly closed, streaming, painful eye. Do not try to look for it yourself and do not let the dog rub, because a seed against a cornea causes an ulcer quickly. Cone or an improvised barrier and straight in.

Up the nose gives violent, repeated sneezing that starts abruptly, sometimes with a blood-tinged discharge from one nostril. Down the throat gives sudden retching and gagging.

The treatment is removal and it is usually not a five-minute job. If a seed is visible and superficial, a vet may get it with forceps while the dog is awake. More often the dog needs sedation or a general anaesthetic, because the seed is inside a tract in the paw or deep in an ear canal, and the vet has to flush and explore to find it. Sometimes it has already broken up and fragments come out over more than one visit. Sometimes it has migrated and cannot be found at all, in which case you are treating an abscess and hoping.

That is the real cost of leaving it a few days, and it is what happened to us. Had I taken her in on the first evening, it would have been a conscious removal. By the time I did, it was sedation, a flush, ten days of antibiotics, and a cone.

Prevention is genuinely effective and takes about a minute a day in season.

Trim the fur between the toes and around the pads short through summer. That mat of hair is what catches the seed in the first place, and a clipped foot rarely picks them up. Same for feathered legs on a spaniel or a setter.

Check after every walk in dry grass, and do it properly. Spread each set of toes and look at the skin between them, run fingers up the legs, check inside the ear flap and around the base of the ears, under the armpits, and around the groin. It sounds like a lot and takes maybe forty seconds once you have a habit of it. I do it on the doorstep before she comes in.

Avoid the worst ground when you can. Ripe barley in July and August is the peak, along with meadow grass gone to seed, verges, and paths through long dry stubble. There is a fortnight or three each summer where the risk is high and a different route solves most of it.

Snoods and dog boots exist and both work if the dog will wear them. A snood covering the ears is genuinely useful for spaniels, who account for a disproportionate share of ear seeds. Boots are harder to sell to a terrier, in my experience, and she got one off and ate it.

Anything you find loose in fur, pull out with fingers. Anything already through the skin, leave it and go to the vet, because a half-extracted seed that snaps leaves the barbed head inside.

She is fine. There is a small bald spot between those toes that never grew back properly, and every July I clip her feet in the garden and she sits there looking betrayed.