The most accurate blood pressure reading you can get for a dog is obtained by inserting a little catheter into one of his arteries and hooking it up to a machine called a transducer. “But it’s hard to get the catheter in and it’s also uncomfortable,” says Dr. Rozanski, “so we don’t tend to go that route very much. The non-invasive method we use most is a Doppler — a sound-wave tool just like the one used in your own doctor’s office.” You put a cuff around a limb or even the tail and then increase the pressure inside the cuff until the pulse can no longer be heard. Then you deflate the cuff and when you hear the pulse return, you take a reading of the numbers, and that’s the dog’s blood pressure.
