Hunter was only a young dog when he got a nasty growth near his ear called a mast cell tumour – these growths need surgical removal with a wide ‘margin’ of normal tissue being removed as well.
If you ‘just’ remove the growth itself you can leave cancer cells in the body which can reform a growth or spread around the body and cause illness somewhere else. A cosmetic consideration here was that Hunter was particularly handsome and a lot of planning went into trying to not disfigure him postoperatively.
We used the skin on his neck to pull up as a graft and close his wound – this worked extremely well and you can see that he has retained his good looks
