Fishing Tackle Injury

Fishing tackle causes a very particular set of injuries in pets, and they nearly all come down to the same problem: a barbed metal hook is designed to go one way and stay put. A dog can get a hook through the lip while investigating a lure, stand on one buried in sand or grass and drive it into a paw pad, or gulp down discarded bait with the hook still inside it. Cats are more often caught out by the line itself, which behaves like any other piece of string they decide to play with. Dogs walked near popular fishing spots, lake shores and harbours are the most common patients, and it usually happens in the couple of seconds before you can intervene.

A hook in the skin of a lip or paw is painful but rarely dangerous in itself. A swallowed hook is a different matter. It can lodge in the throat, the oesophagus (the tube from mouth to stomach) or the stomach wall, and the barb can pierce tissue as it travels, with a risk of perforation and infection inside the abdomen. Line and leader material carry their own risk: if one end snags, often around the base of the tongue, the intestines keep trying to push the rest along and instead concertina up around it, and the line can gradually saw through the bowel wall. Vets call this a linear foreign body, and it is one of the reasons swallowed line matters even when no hook is attached. Lead sinkers add a poisoning risk on top of the physical one.

Signs worth acting on straight away:

• pawing or rubbing at the mouth, drooling, or trouble swallowing
• gagging, retching or repeated vomiting
• a length of line visible at the mouth or the back end
• suddenly refusing food, or becoming quiet and withdrawn
• limping and licking one paw
• a tense, painful belly

Two things not to do while you organise a vet visit. Do not pull on line you can see, at either end. If the other end is anchored, traction can tighten it and make internal damage worse. And do not try to make your pet sick, because a hook coming back up can catch on the way. Hooks embedded in a lip can sometimes be pushed through and the barb cut off, but this is a roadside measure for when a vet is genuinely out of reach, and it still needs following up.

At the clinic, an x-ray shows metal clearly and tells your vet where the hook has got to, which decides everything else. A hook in the oesophagus or stomach can often be retrieved with an endoscope, a flexible camera passed down under anaesthetic, avoiding surgery altogether. Hooks that have moved into the intestine, or line that has already bunched the gut, generally need an operation. Prevention is mostly about tidiness: keep tackle boxes shut, deal with one lure at a time, take line and bait home with you, and keep dogs on the lead where other people fish. This is general information, not a diagnosis; anything involving tackle and your pet is worth a same-day phone call to a vet.