It depends on what you call a test. Fingers in front of their face, making sure they blink appropriately, dropping a cotton ball, and having them track you without making noises are usually the things we do for vision tests. If they're really scared, all bets are off. They sort of stare at you blankly with their eyes open. You're like, "I think you can see me." It's some crude stuff, almost caveman-style testing to see if they can see or if they blink when something is coming toward them. Those are some common things we do.

Yes and no. If you're looking through your cabinet for things to give your dog, the answer is no. But many medications that we dispense are human drops. They're on the human line of things, so it's not weird that we're using human drops for dogs. But if you don't know what you're treating, there are way too many things to choose from. I do not recommend grabbing Visine or something like that. That's never a recommendation for treating a dog's red eye or whatever it may be. In general, I'd say don't use anything. However, I will say this, one of the potentially safer things to do if you were trying to get an appointment and just wanted to flush your dog's eye out, would be to use plain sterile Saline. Saline only, not contact solution, not Visine. You can run it across the eye to flush it out.

You do want to make sure, though, because if you use something like an old eye medicine, it may have cortisone in it, and you don't want to use those until you know what's going on with that eye. If there's a scratch, you can make it worse, or conversely it won't do anything. The best is to wait and not medicate until your vet has had a chance to look at the dog's eye.

Some people will say, "Well, he's had this before.", but there's a big difference between a red-eye two years ago and a red-eye today. There can be some subtleties where that one was just inflammation and allergies, and this one is a scratch. Steroids on a scratch are not okay and will make it worse.

The answer's typically going to be no. The word infection might be a bit tricky because we're not necessarily seeing a lot of infections. It may just be an inflammation situation or maybe a certain disease. But often when eye things come up, unless it was something in the eye and they were tearing a little bit and 10 minutes later it was fine, treatment of some form is needed to fix it. If you don't address it, more chronic things start to happen. I would stay on the side of caution and not assume it's not going to go away on its own.

If you suspect an eye issue, have it looked at. There are plenty of times where it's not a big deal and has a simple treatment, it could be nothing. But there are plenty of times where if you blow it off, it turns into something worse or a situation we don't want it to be. A more expensive situation than the original problem would have been.

There's a difference between pink eye and cherry eye. There's also a difference between dogs and people because to get a cherry eye, you've got to have that third eyelid where you've got that gland that pops up and out. It's down in that middle portion and it bulges out. If your dog has a cherry eye, surgery is typically recommended. It used to be that you'd go in and they cut it out. If it's not there, the problem is solved. But that created all kinds of new problems because there's a gland there that's important with tearing. So typically, it's tucked and secured back in. If the cherry eye is out for a long time, surgery becomes less effective down the road. In some cases, we have to send you to a specialist and have them take care of it.