PRINCIPLES OF VETERINARY SURGERY 301 



veterinary practice. Horses that bite are not rare. They 

 attack their fellow animal in the neck and withers. Except 

 when afflicted with rabies or psevido-rabies ruminants do 

 not attack with the teeth. The bites of shepherd dogs hay- 

 ing hard teeth, wound sheep, oxen and even horses. Dogs 

 bite horses in the scrotum, nose and ears. Bites of the wild 

 camivora and wounds of birds are only in rare instances in- 

 flicted upon domestic animals. ., 



SYMPTOMS. — The physiognomy of the bite depends 

 upon the biting animal. The horse crushes the tissues. His 

 bite is rather characteristic — the incisors seize the tissues 

 and crush them without chewing. There is no laceration 

 except when the bitten animal makes a vigorous efifort to 

 escape. The teeth leave an elliptical, cutaneous lesion that 

 becomes tumefied, and defined by a furrow of more or less 

 depth where the tissues are crushed. The,bite of a dog is 

 very dififerent; it combines the punctured with the lacerated 

 wound. When the dog bites he imbeds the teeth into the 

 tissues and drags them toward him. by abrupt side-move- 

 ments of the head. The nature of the lesion is sometimes 

 difficult to determine. 



The ox bites only in very rare instances, and in conse- 

 quence of the absence of unner incisors and the mobility of 

 the inferior ones his bite lacks the gravity of that of the pre- 

 ceding animals. 



When there has been no laceration the region bitten, if 

 observed a short time after, is tumefied, hot and very pain- 

 ful. The skin may be mortified and the connective tissue 

 may be the seat of abundant haemorrhage. 



Bites are always serious. When the teeth have not inoc- 

 ulated a specific patjiogenic micro-organism as in rabies they 

 frequently leave other virulent germs in the tissues. The in- 

 oculated focus is bruised, composed of traumatized elements, 

 is soaked with serum and blood, and has become an excel- 



