While blood items are quicker available in human medication, they are somewhat rarer in animals.
Blood transfusions are important to enhance oxygen bring capability and save an animal’s life.
Just like individuals, dogs and cats have various blood types. Giving a matched blood transfusion reduces the threat of an unfavorable response.
They require blood contributions for animals who require severe surgical treatments, have actually had a distressing mishap, or have a medical condition like anaemia.
The advantages of your family pet contributing blood consist of complimentary pre-inclusion health screen, blood typing and yearly health screening for donors.
Pets that contribute frequently will receive complimentary blood items if they require them due to health problem or mishap.
Dr Benoît Cuq, who handles the blood donor center, informed Independent.ie: “One donation can help three patients. So, if you come with your dog once, they might help treat three different pets on three different occasions.
“There’s a shortage of blood for several reasons, there’s a big difference between dogs and cats. For dogs, donors have to be a certain size, they’ve to be over 25kg, they’ve to be young and healthy.
Dogs must be young, healthy and over 25kg to donate
“For dogs, we can store the blood so we’ve people coming with their dogs regularly, they’ll come twice a year, or at most, three times a year.
“Cats are trickier, they need to be sedated during blood donations because they cannot stay still. We only do cat blood donations on an emergency basis.
“If we have a cat that needs a transfusion, we will reach out to people on our list and try to get one available person to bring their cat that day.
“Our cat blood donor list is small. We do the health screen, we want cats over 4.5kgs, healthy, ideally indoors and ideally have never left Ireland.
“We use blood for different types of patients. We have patients in intensive care units that have had blood loss in a road traffic accident or something like that.
“There are also patients with acute trauma, we’ve patients who go for complicated surgeries. Some surgeries may bleed more than others, so some may require blood donations.
“A dog may have a coagulation effect or anaemia where the bone marrow cannot produce red blood cells too.”
