PatPat321
New Born Pup
Today we noticed that one of our guinea pigs has lost a nail and a whole finger of it's front foot? Any ideas why?
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Missing Nails?
- Thread starter PatPat321
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Catching the nail and ripping it off is not quite rare. I assume that the quick is still attached? I doubt that it has lost the toe itself, as the loss of blood would have been to great.
Please have the toe seen by a vet; especially if notice any signs of infection. If the rip is very severe, it is likely that the toe will stay stunted and the nail may never grow back or will at the best only grow back malformed.
However, your guinea pig can still get around normally in the long term although it may no longer run around quite as madly.
Make sure that you disinfect carefully with saline solution. You can either get it from a pharmacy or make it at home by mixing 1-2 teaspoons of salt into 1 pint/500 ml of boiled, cooled water.
The actual finger is gone, or the nail is gone all the way down to the toe? It's possible to rip a nail off at the base (one of my pigs did it once.) It did eventually grow back, but took a long time. We watched it very closely for infection and cleaned it with saline when it was still fresh. If you are actually missing a toe itself (the skin/bone part, not the nail) I would definitely have that seen by a vet.
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