How to treat dog's ear wound

[Kat_024]

My dog got into a fight with one of our other dogs and ended up with a gash on his ear. A portion of this gash goes all the way through to the other side. I would say the portion that is a complete puncture is roughly .25 in. long. He has pretty floppy ears and I spoke to the vet and they recommended just keeping an eye on it. It hardly bled and we cleaned it very well. Talked to a few people and decided to treat with liquid bandage to try and stabilize the area as well as bandaged it to hold the ear still.

Obviously I understand to watch out for infection etc. but does anyone have any experience on if his ear will heal back together? Or is he destined for a permanent hole in his ear? TIA!

Edited to add more details:

Just removed the bandage from this morning and it would appear the liquid bandage might be doing its job. The wound itself isn’t swollen but his ear in general is definitely slightly swollen. I again assume this is fairly normal considering the trauma his ear endured yesterday?

[bits619]

With the obvious caveat of myself not being a vet or tech… What i’d do is the liquid bandage. I’d probably take him into the vet during normal hours tomorrow, if it were my dog, because i’d hate for him to develop problems with it that would make things worse.
He’s probably going to shake his head and scratch at it when it starts to heal. You might want to try what I did for my weimaraner’s recurrent ear wound, which I posted about recently… I bought a cheap pair of leg warmers on Amazon (2-3 bucks), and put it over his head, letting the ear lie flat underneath. Depending on the size you could get girl’s sized leg warmers, but for my 70lb dude the adult size worked well. Knee sock with the toe cut out would also do the trick.
Thankfully i’d already tortured- errr, desensitized- him to such shenanigans before we needed the legwarmer… but it was just enough to keep the ear from whacking against his head, and it buffered it whenever he did scratch at it.
plus, you get to have photos like this…
https://scontent-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/t1.0-9/547852_10102874717729470_1125113853_n.jpg

[Kat_024]

Thanks for the reply! I’ve been using vet wrap to loosely secure the ear to the side of his head so he can’t shake/scratch at it and it is working well. Your other ideas are great too! If needed I’ll try them.

There isn’t any redness around the wound but like I said his ear in general is a bit swollen. I might put a cool compress on it this evening and see if the swelling goes down. If it gets worse I will definitely take him to the vet. I assume some swelling is normal?