YOU may have heard it said before that ‘if your dog has demodectic mange, just get some motor oil and rub it on the infected parts’.
This remedy has all the features of an old wives tale.
It is entirely untrue. This remedy sounds too good to be true, and it is. It’s pretty much a given that whenever an industrial-grade fluid touches naked skin, the results will always be unpleasant. This includes dumping the stuff on a dog with a skin problem.
What happens to your dog if you rub the oil on it?
For starters, there’s always the severe rashes that will result due to skin irritation.
It will also cause extensive skin damage, because your dog’s skin will actually absorb all the toxic chemicals from the motor oil.
That’s all just on the surface, but it gets much worse.
When a dog absorbs the oil through the skin, it penetrates the body and affects the internal system too. Obviously, this causes a whole new host of problems, such as drastic changes in blood pressure, as well as severe kidney and liver damage.
All this makes for a list of things horrible enough to be nightmarish, but unfortunately there’s one more gruesome aspect left to cover.
Remember how dogs just love to lick and bite themselves all over, especially if they have demodectic mange?
What happens if they follow their instincts and proceed to lick their own skin after being coated with motor oil? They’ll swallow it, and the oil will induce vomiting, which in turn will introduce some of the oil into the lungs as well. This subsequently gives them pneumonia.
That should be enough of a reason why you should never, ever use motor oil to treat demodectic mange.
