# Rat won't leave surgery site alone



## Prince (Jun 17, 2016)

I have a 2 year old female rat who just had two mammary tumors removed earlier this week.

The first few days she didn't really bother it, but now she wont stop licking and fussing with the surgery site. She is still on antibiotics and pain medicine (meloxidyl and trimethoprimsulfa), and i took her to the vet yesterday to have her incision looked at, and he said it would probably be fine as long as she stayed on the antibiotics for the full duration, but she might need a different type of antibiotic soon. The incision was held together by surgical glue which has been entirely licked off at this point, despite my efforts to get her to stop. She just has a hole in her groin now that occasionally fills with pus. 

Now what I want to do is get her to stop licking it. Ive tried doing body wraps at varying degrees of restrictiveness, a sock wrap, and even a cone. She can slinky her way out of whatever restraint I put her in, but she absolutely needs to stop licking it. I'm out of ideas on how to get her to leave it alone. If anyone has another idea, I'll try just about anything now.


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## desdisques (Apr 16, 2018)

When my cat broke 2 toes she kept ripping her split/bandage off. It happened about 4 times. What sort of worked for me was putting a sock on it and putting duct tape over the sock. NEVER put the duct tape directly on the animal. For some reason she didn't bother it as much that way. If you do try this be extremely careful and don't constrict enough to hurt your rat or cut off circulation. She might get be able to wiggle out of it anyway. You could also try some bitter apple spray. NEVER put this directly on a wound/incision but you can put it on the healthy skin close to the surgical site. Some people do this when their pet is neutered or spayed. Please take this all with a grain of salt, I'm an experienced dog and cat owner but I'm very new to rats so I'm just giving you ideas that have worked for dogs and cats in the past.


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## Steffy (Oct 6, 2017)

Maybe keeping the wound clean and continuing the antibiotics is good enough - I'm also no expert but after reading this story
http://www.ratfanclub.org/surgery.html
and looking at the pics, it may not be necessary to stop your rat licking.


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## raqathta (Sep 16, 2015)

Your situation may be resolved by now. I had a similar problem with one of my rats. I started making a sort of jacket. I bought a harness and leash, then cut an old crew sock and sewed it onto the harness. I was going to cut holes in the end of the sock for the tail and hind feet. I never finished it, because I found that I could use a standard, flexible-fabric band-aid over the incision. The flex band-aids don't hurt as much to remove as the plastic ones. A little fur came off with the band-aid, but not nearly as much as I expected. And the rat hardly complained at all. He had pulled his stitches out. The vet tried all sorts of bandages; none worked. Finally he made a rat-sized Elizabethan collar. My rat HATED it!


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## athenianratdaddy (Dec 20, 2017)

I remember, years ago, the vet put a miniature dog collar on a rat that had surgery, do they still make those? However rats REALLY don't like those things (more so than dogs). For the two days that the collar had to stay on I spend every waking hour with the rattie (I've forgotten his name, I used to have boys back then) ttrying to pacify him and distract him.


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