Pet First Aid and CPR Course

Recently, I participated in PetTech’s First Aid and CPR class. Class had a rocky start with the instructor showing up an hour late. Yeah you read that right… an hour!

However, once the class started. I quickly became happy I enrolled. We learned how to muzzle a dog correctly. Muzzling is important for your safety, because a hurt dog is often scared and unpredictable, and they can accidentally harm the people trying to help. We also learned how to find a dog’s heartbeat, how to assess whether a dog is breathing or not and the snout to tail assessment. We were supposed to be given handouts to help document any findings during the snout to tail assessment, but the instructor, failed to provide them.

The course thoroughly covered how to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation (also known as CPR) on a variety of different canine body types. The CPR is used when your doggie patient is not breathing and does not have a heartbeat. Like people, dogs come in a variety of shapes and sizes so the technique varied depending on the type of canine you were trying to help. We also covered what to do in the event your dog starts choking.

Some of the First Aid items included: insect and snake bites, heat related injuries, heat stroke, cold injuries, seizures and what to do if your dog is bleeding from an injury.

PetTech’s First Aid and CPR class was very informative, and it would have been an even more enjoyable experience except for the late start and not receiving a copy of the snout to tail assessment sheet. I would recommend taking the course if you get the chance.