good morning I'm Dr Marx from Timberland
Animal Clinic and we're going to talk
today about how you clean your dog's
ears and my assistant today is Dawn so
I'm going to show you the basic cleaning
for cleaning ears this would apply to
dogs and cats and a lot of times I see
clients who are doing it wrong and so
sometimes you can cause damage to ear if
that happens
one of the things to be aware of is if
there is redness or inflammation or a
lot of wax and odor in the ear then you
probably should take your pet into the
animal clinic and have it checked out
don't clean the ears before you take
your pet in otherwise your doctor won't
be able to analyze that sample
so what we've got here are our basic
tools we've got cotton balls mostly
you're going to use cotton balls and you
might use just a few Q-tips but don't go
crazy on them because that's where you
can cause some damage you should have an
ear cleaning solution and an ear
cleaning solution will help to break
down the wax you should never use
alcohol or peroxide in your pet's ear
because that could really be painful and
cause more damage I usually tell my
clients if you don't want to put it in
your eye then you shouldn't put it in
the ear either
so we're going to just put the solution
on the cotton ball and that's one step
that a lot of times people don't do
they'll just squirt the whole solution
right down into the ear and you'll never
be able to get all that solution out of
the ear canal
so I usually just take a cluster of
cotton balls with Solution on the
majority of them and I just start wiping
from the center of the ear
and my fingers are going to be padded by
the cotton ball but I can really feel
every little crevice inside that ear
canal so I'm just going to keep wiping
until I don't have any more wax on the
on the cotton ball
and it should feel good to your pet if
there's any pain associated with it then
either you're doing it too roughly or
there may actually be in your problem
but in older dogs their ear canals
actually begin to calcify the cartilage
gets real rigid and so in an old dog you
can't get real vigorous in there with
the ear cleaning because that can be
painful
so after I think I've done a really good
job of cleaning
I want to double check check and look
down inside the ear canal and in this
case I do see just a little bit of wax
and some of the little crevices there so
that's where I would use my Q-tip
and at the very end then I'm just going
to take a dry cotton ball and make sure
that I've absorbed all of the excess
fluid that's in the ear canal so I don't
leave any that runs up against the
eardrum
and then you repeat on the other side
and that's how you clean ears