UPDATE:

The dog is still alive. Treated for six days. Wound looks great, dag is playing with other dag.

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Despite our own crappy situation, we fell in love with a small furry street urchin. However, our current dog, Ava, did not share our love. There have been three fights, each worst than the last. Sasha, the new pup is 9 months old and dumb as a box of rocks, but she is powerful and fast. She wont submit to Ava, and gets her ass royally kicked. Well, even thiuh she won this last one, Ava was chomped in her armpit as she used Sasha's head for a chew toy. Its been three days of Ava getting Aspirin for pain, and keeping it clean. Her arm is swollen and tender but she barely limps when Sasha is around. Sasha will have a bitching set of scars but she seems ok and is now more submissive to Ava.

I went to the feed store and picked up some equine/poultry/swine tetracycline powder with 10g effective tetracycline. The feed store guy and he internet said it would work, just do the math right for body weight. Before the doubters come in here saying to to a vet, we have no money and I have no job.

I dissolved the powder packet into a measuring cup with bottled water until I had 500ml of solution. It had to be crunched up as it crystalized on me. By my math, that gives me 20mg of tetracycline per ml of solution. My dog can have between 5mg and 10mg per pound of weight. I calculated her dose at 5mg per pound, so at 70 lbs thats 17.5 ml every 8 hours.  I am going to treat for 5 days. I had a buddy smarter than me check my math, its correct.

Ava can use the leg and has near full range of motion. Relfexes to paw tickle are normal so her nerve function is intact. The wound is hot to the touch and still swollen so I am treating for infection. I think she is living it up because we are feeding her treats and paying extra attention to her, cause when food hits the floor, she moves like lightning still.

The solution tastes like crap, so I made a gravy with potted meat and her dose and poured it over a bowl of food. Of course she would not eat it unless mommy held the bowl.

Similar methods may be used at your own risk to treat people in an emergency. Look up the dosages for humans. If a human needs 500mg then the dose is 25ml of solution. Put it in juice, its bad. Children with teeth below the gumline, unerupted, will have thier adult teeth stained by the tetracycline, but in a third world situation, its better than dying.

Thoughts, opinions, advise, or your own experiences please reply.
Please dont do this till we know my dog will live.

Nevermind.

No way. I hate needles and cant imagine injecting my dog or making a backyard IV rig. I put it on food with potted meat product. My dog would eat broken glass if i put potted meat on it.

Three thoughts:  first, antibiotics need to be chosen based on they type of bacteria causing the infection.   Second, some drugs that work for people or other animals can kill dogs.  Third, it might not be possible to derive the dosage simply by weight.  Reducing the dosage proportionally for an average 150 lb human to the dog's weight may not give the correct dose.   You should be able to find all if this information on the web somewhere.

That being said, it may work just fine.

Did you have any solubility problems (i.e., powder/granules that did not dissolve)? In the lab, we dissolve tetracycline in 70% ethanol and then store the stock solution in a -20 degree C freezer (where it remains very cold, but does not freeze).

Tetracyclines (and many other drugs) are degraded by hydrolysis in water. You can't stop this, but you can slow it down by refrigerating the solution you made.

Tetracyclines (and many other drugs) are also very sensitive to light, so store them away from light-- especially strong light sources like a sunny window.

If you haven't read it yet, the big tacked thread on antibiotics has lots of good advice from docs, a pharmaceutical chemist, and other folks in the know.  

issues in water? Yup! Turned into  concrete!

For reference the tetracycline was $8.25 for the pouch. It would likely take two pouches treat an adult human. I used bottled water. Tetracycline is best for respiratory and intestinal tract infections, but should work on a wide variety of issues as it is broad spectrum. The only other choice I have is penicillin which is a huge risk for me due to allergy.

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If the stuff doesn't go into solution or you have a precipitate form later on you cannot trust that the concentration is what you predicted it would be.

Sigma-Aldrich (a chemical supplier) lists the solubility of tetracycline in water as 10 mg/mL. This paper says that tetracycline is soluble to 17.8mg/mL at 68 degrees F (293 K/20 degrees C) but only 12.7mg/mL at 58 degrees F (288 K/15 degrees C), so refrigerating an aqueous solution of tetracycline is probably not a good idea.  

10g in 500mL = 10,000mg/500mL = 20mg/mL

You may be able to dilute that down further to get the remaining stuff into solution. Sigma and that paper I linked would suggest that you need about twice as much water as you started with-- 10g in 1L-- to be soluble down to around 58 F.

No offense, but you need better options. Read the tacked thread.

Damn you guys are smart. I thought that was it. Like when you have too much sugar in water and crystals form. I am going to cut the solution in half and top off in another 500 ml bottle and give her 35ml per dose. I love this place so much. You people kid about someone being sick or injured posting on arfcom instead of going to a doctor. Arfcom gives better advice, faster, cheaper, and more sarcastically.

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Glad to help, but I should clarify that I'm not a doc. I hope I didn't give that impression.

So far as sarcasm goes...

Doctor: "Jim, I'm sorry. You're dying."
Patient: "Doc, I want a second opinion!"
Doctor: "Ok, you're ugly, too."

ok. I added 500ml to the solution and BAM, no more precipitate! I was going to use ever clear (ethanol), but I hate dogs with hangovers. So whiney.

With the resources you mention having, I think you did just fine OP!

I hope your dogs work out their differences...


I've used tetracycline once ---a big horse pill.  

Broke off chunks and they worked fine. It was way past it's expiry date too...  

Once I used injectable Combiotic and completely misdiagnosed my ailment. I thought I was dying from an infection, and when I got to the doc and 'splained things to him abt a day later, he looked at my white cell count and ruled out an infection, I had a kidney stone he laughed.  

About the only one -of many, I ever went to the doc for.

My mother is a nurse, so I have a deeper knowledge than most people I know. Thank God I knew the symptoms for a kidney stone or I would have thouht I was dying it hurt so bad. I still called 911, because after pissing and shittig myself, and then vomiting in the front yard like a sprinkler head as I screamed like a dying trex for 45 mins, it only seemed prudent as I doubted I could drive.

My dag is doing much better already.  The swelling is down, the wound is no longer hot to the touch, her limp has improved, and I can see in her face her discomfort level is way down. She actually wants to spend time outside now laying in the sun.

My Dag is about 80% now. Slight limp but shes playing with the death machine that tried to chew her leg off a few days ago. shes eating like a pig, too. The wound itself is still swollen but i lightly massage it to try and break up the crap in there. I think there might be some joint damage or ligament damage but its healing very well.

MY DAG IS STILL ALIVE!!! I gave her the last dose today. I have about 500ml left. We ended up dosing her only 3 times a day instead of four so we went a few days longer.
So... I guess it works.

The wound is just a few scabs now and still tender but healing up very well.

Tetracycline is not that great of a drug for dog wounds as most bacteria in dog wounds are obligate anaerobes and tetracycline isn't so hot with them.  Next time try something like amoxicillin.  My favorite for dog wounds is Clavamox (amoxi-clav) or Augmentin in human meds.

God Bless you.

This comes up every so often here.

Not modern tetracycline. Like the past 40 years or so...


An issue may be discoloration of youngsters' teeth.

I agree. All they had at the feed store was packets of Tetra or injectable Penicillin. I figured I would give it two days of dosing, if no improvement then go with the Penicillin.
Of course, if that didn't work, it would be off to the Vets. We have little money right now, but the security and companionship that dog has given us over the last 9 years... we owe her some back pay.

Her leg still gets fatigued faster than normal, like if she runs for a while she will limp. Might actually take a while to heal to 100%, or could be permanent. She is old, but not decrepit.

The young one didn't have any infection, even though her head wounds were deeper and bled more. Maybe the bleeding cleaned the wound. We stopped Ava's bleeding with Sage, Garlic, and Honey Salve. I'l let it bleed longer next time.

Good initiative, I like that...

Dag still alive.

He's lucky to have someone with aggressive initiative to care for him...

They got into another fight!

This time I had to put 6 stitches in my Keeper dog and the Foster dog found a new home. More tetracycline for a week.

When stitching a dog, bacon bits or crumbled Doritos help keep her calm.

I could cut off my dog's leg if i had bacon to distract her.

I used double cotton thread. I used a needle on each end. Once you get a few stitches in the wound, you run out of space for a straight needle if you are using one.

Work from INSIDE the wound. Don't pull the wound tight like you are sewing pants. Leave a little room for swelling and movement.

How did you sterilize the needle and thread? How did you clean the wound? How tightly is it closed?

Sometimes it's better to leave a really dirty wound open to heal by secondary intent than it is to close it because closure can create an environment conducive to infection.

(Disclaimer: I'm not a doc, I didn't stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, etc., etc.)

I used scotch to sterilize.

I got the wound to within 1mm in most areas, but it was ragged from being a bite. the potential for swelling due to trauma was great.

The other thing you need to try and account for is that the edges of the wound will most likely die from the trauma which is why we like to trim them to bleeding tissue prior to suturing.  If you are going to close wounds you need to make sure the underlying tissue is clean and not traumatized- this is rare in a dog bite wound, otherwise you should probably place a drain or you'll end up with an abscess despite the antibiotics.  As I think I said before sometime tetracycline isn't really that good at killing the most common bacteria we see in bite wounds.  My fav is clavamox or in human meds- augmentin.  Even regular old amoxicillin is better than tetracycline

I inspected the area INSIDE the wound and it was intact. It looked like she was being skinned, like when you dress out a rabbit. You could see the muscle sheath. The edges were still bleeding a bit. Part of the reason for me leaving the wound slightly open was to facilitate drainage.

This isn't something I hope to ever do again. It was slightly traumatic for me and effed me up in the head somewhat.

Its good experience though, in case I ever have to do it to people.

I was wishing I had the money to pay someone else to do it with every stitch.

I watched it really close for any signs that the infection was getting beyond my control.

I do not recommend stitching up your dog unless you are virtually homeless and living in an RV and she is your primary means of threat detection and deterrence.