Nothing could stop Sasha Simone, a Doberman pinscher-Great Dane mix, from licking her ankle wound raw. Not bitter apple sprays. Not cone-shaped collars.
But Monique Weldon, a veterinarian at Colorado’s Coal Creek Veterinary Hospital, remembered the samples she’d received of a new all-natural pet bandage designed to stop pets from licking wounds and hot spots.
So she applied the Anti-Lick Strip Prevent adhesive strips around the edges of Sasha’s wound and waited. Four weeks later, Sasha and her owners returned — for the first time in months, her wound was healing.
“It actually shrunk by 90 percent,” Weldon says, amazed by the results.
The magic is in the strip’s ingredients: oregano, lemon powder, clove oil and spicy cayenne pepper, which turns away even the most ornery dogs. The strip, though not applied directly over the wound, acts like a protective fence around it. It’s a line dogs won’t cross, and the effects last as long as the bandage is applied.
“Nine out of 10 times, the animal will smell those peppers, and they won’t even attempt to go to the area and lick,” says Lisa Huntsman, (pictured above) president of Nurtured Pets, which makes the product. “If they do, they will get a lot of heat from that cayenne pepper, and that deters them.”
The strip targets habitual lickers, comparable to anxious nail biters who do it out of habit. But more serious are the consequences of ripping stitches from surgeries or licking that leads to infection or worse, amputation.
Instead of traditional bandages or topical sprays that need to be re-applied often and contain chemicals such as isopropanol, the strip is constant reinforcement, and the ingredients aren’t harmful. Clinical trials found the pet bandage is 90 percent effective for dogs, and 98 percent effective for cats.
Weldon’s last resort is the first product of the New Philadelphia-based company, a division of Lauren International, which serves multiple industries, including software and manufacturing. And though pet bandages seem far from those areas, Huntsman saw its potential because adhesives were already one of Lauren’s strongest suits.
“We’ve all been taught to think outside the box, think of new things that are different and creative,” Huntsman says. So when she discovered the anti-lick strips two years ago, Lauren International bought the exclusive rights.
She noticed the first signs of success shortly after launching the product in August 2008. In the first 35 days, Nurtured Pets’ website received 30,000 hits. Within nine months, the line was picked up by PetSmart and Petco stores.
“The response continues to just pick up,” she says. “I think we will see tremendous acceptance of the product once people continue to become aware of it.”
Huntsman already sees the potential and knows exactly where it’s going: larger strips for homes and horses.
“Where the anti-lick strip goes directly onto the animal, the home product is designed to go onto inanimate objects within your home,” such as walls, baseboards, hinges, kitchen cabinetry and even furniture legs to keep animals, like young pups, from chewing.
For horses, the strips will prevent “cribbing,” which is when an animal grabs onto its stall and inhales. The behavior ends up damaging the stall. She estimates that 10 percent of horses have this problem, but larger strips attached to their stalls will prevent it.
Huntsman, who also plays mom to puggles Oscar and Oliver, has felt intrinsic benefits of the strips herself. “The ingredients, being all natural, makes it feel very safe for the pet owner,” she says.
And with the product’s U.S. patent expected to be granted this summer and an international patent recently filed, Huntsman has high hopes: The anti-lick strips are now available in the United States, Germany and Sweden, and she expects the line to break even by the end of the year.
And why not, there are 40 million households in the U.S. with at least one cat or dog. “If we could be in 10 percent of the households in the next five years, that’s tremendous for this product line.”