What Is The Carpal Pad?
When thinking of our paws and pads, most humans never really think about the carpal pad. In fact some do not realise it is even there. This is not to say your humans are not taking care of you. It is because the carpal pad is not as obvious as the rest of our pads.
The best way I can describe the carpal pad is to describe the paws in general. Veterinarians look away, because this is a non medical description. BOL!
Humans have bones in their hands. The phalanges that are commonly called fingers. Then between fingers and the wrist, they have their metacarpal bones and then they have a series of bones in their wrist that are called carpal bones.
The layout of dog’s paws are similar to human hands. We have phalanges that are commonly called toes. Which we have digital pads underneath. We then have the metacarpals between our toes and our wrist. We have a matching metacarpal pad underneath, which is larger and just behind the digital pads. Then we have all of the bones in our wrist area that is also called the carpal bones. The carpal pad is on the back of our wrist. We do not have carpal pads on our rear legs.
The pads are made from fatty tissue and thick hardened skin. When we are puppies, they are usually still soft and pink. We have 5 toes on our front paws and 4 toes on the rear paws.
In some breeds finding the carpal pad is a bit of an adventure. In smaller breeds the carpal pads may be immediately behind the metacarpal pad and be less obvious and softer. There are the hairy breeds that need a huge exploration to even see anything in there BOL! Then there are tall breeds like myself that have our carpal pads so far off the ground, our humans do not realise they are pads.
The actual full part of our paw is not used up until we need to walk on harsher surfaces, speed up, jump, go up or down steep hills. Or better still go off lead and bat fink crazy!
When walking as a normal slow pace, we usually only walk on our digital pads and metacarpal pad. That are all conveniently clustered on the underside and near the front of our paws. Which is how most humans think we walk. Well we do, but that is only part of it. The best way to sort of explain is that we are walking up on tip toe at this point.
The carpal pad gives us a lot of grip, support and cushioning to our paws and wrists. It also spreads the surface area we walk on. A sort of built in shock absorber.
To stop ourselves falling over or losing control at high speed, we shift our weight from walking just on our toes and start to run using the rest of our paw and along with it the carpal pad. This increases the ability to speed up, it also increases the ability to turn fast and at high speed.
The carpal pads are great for braking power when we need to do a pawsome power slide too. As we only have carpal pads on our front paws, we can also do some really pawsome power sliding spins too. High speed and power slides are probably when we get the most scuffs and scrapes to the carpal and other pads. BOL!