Managing Tear Stains

A friend recently asked me about keeping brown tear stains at bay.  I thought this might be the start of another good topic to blog about.

A lot of dogs have reddish brown tear stains running from it's eyes.  You can't stop the tearing, but you can do things to clean the dog's face and make him look better.  It will be a regular maintenance ritual, but with all things, your dog can be taught to enjoy the attention if you make it pleasant.

I don't remember the name of the tear cleaning pads I got from Petco.   What I do remember is that they looked like little mini Noxema pads.  They were wet with a solution that I would use once a day on Cooper's eyes.  The stains didn't go away all at once, but they did become a little lighter each time I cleaned his eyes.  I'm sure the whole stain was finally gone when the old stained hair grew out and the new hair came in.  The new hair was being cleaned daily so as not to become stained also.  It was an ongoing process but never took very long once Cooper accepted the daily preening.

Be patient.  Don't try to scrub it all off if your dog objects.  You may have to train your dog to accept this grooming before you can actually get serious about the stains.  Don't be afraid to give little treats for letting you get close enough to clean his eyes.   He may not even allow you to touch him at first.  Let him smell the pad and treat him.  The next day do it again.  He'll learn to look for the pads and associate it with the treats.  Then you can work on touching him with the pad, then little wiping motions.  Soon you will be cleaning his eyes while he lays his head lazily in your lap until it's TREAT TIME.

Another thing I do is I keep the hair between and around his eyes shorter.  This way the hair isn't poking him in the eyes.  His eyes won't tear as much if they aren't constantly irritated.  With short haired dogs, this isn't an option.  Sorry.

Wrinkly dogs have saggy eyes and the tears tend to just roll out of the eyes and down their faces.  There isn't much you can do about that either.  Just keep wiping the face.  Maybe with dogs that tear a lot you might want to consider wiping his eyes twice a day.

So, once you get the eyes looking good, old stained hair cut away or allowed to grow out and fall out naturally (it can seem to take forever), all you'll have to do is maintain it.  Keep them clean.  If that means using tear cleaning pads every day to maintain, I would do that.  Cooper's eyes don't tear a lot unless his hair is long and poking him.  I keep the hair around his eyes short and we're always picking the tear dirt from the corners of his eyes so it never builds up.  

So in summary, the answer to this problem isn't a quick fix, but to me it's worth having the nice clean face to look at.  

Cooper - 8 or 9 months old.  FINALLY with clean eyes