I designed and printed a custom nose guard to help my dog with DLE
(snoutcover.com)523 points by ragswag 3 days ago
523 points by ragswag 3 days ago
This is so awesome! I actually think, with a few tweaks this can be a really great protection against foxtails.
Foxtails are extremely lethal and can lead to thousands of dollars in vet bills. All current protections in the market are effectively a bag over your pet’s face, which as you can imagine, are not that popular with the pets.
https://amosdudley.com/weblog/Designing-PPE-for-Hilde has a story of designing a 3d print for foxtails.
I have a tiny long-haired dog (the first dog I've ever had) and I'm glad our first trainer/behaviourist mentioned the dangers of foxtails to us. We casually asked the vet if it was a problem and she said they see around 2-3 animals a week with issues caused by foxtails during the late summer/early autumn months. This is in the Southern UK. It's been getting drier and drier every year. And subsequently more and more foxtails seem to be appearing.
The main issue we've found is she gets them stuck under her "armpits" and under the tail. Places that make them very difficult to find. Even more insidious is when they embed themselves in the harness, only to make an appearance weeks or months later when the outdoor foxtails have mostly been cut down.
The problem is that they can work their way under the skin with a barbed spike that is one-way only. So if they get deep enough the only remedy is to cut the skin with a scalpel - by the vet of course.
This is interesting. Foxtails are pretty common where I live, so common that one species of Foxtail has the name of the city (Bromus madritensis) (Madrid, Spain). Not a single time it has affected any of my dogs or even heard about it being a problem at all. I wonder if it's not all species of Foxtail
I like that the creator is giving the STL away for free
It's awesome, lots of kudos to the creator for doing so! Personally I'm more likely to buy things where the authors makes the schematic/3D object/whatever available for free for the DIY people out there, and those who couldn't otherwise get the thing to them for one or another reason.
> I know there are other dogs and owners out there facing similar struggles. That’s why I’m sharing this design for free. While it’s not adjustable by design, it should fit medium-to-large dogs as is. If needed, measurements can be adjusted using the scaling feature in your slicer software, but some slots, like those for the straps, might deform in the process.
Only missing for it to be a parametric design people could easily adjust based on their own measurements, but trivial to change yourself too, so again, lots of thanks to the author for improving the whole world, not just a tiny piece of it.
Not trivial, but not impossible either. Usually though the product would be designed in some CAD program, and when the shop customizes measurements they adjust them manually based on copies of the model. The "pro" way would be to have a parametrized version, but it's also trickier to create. I'm not 100% sure, but I'm getting the vibe the author picked up modelling/3D printing as they went along, so the easier route would be hardcoded values changed for each customer.
Creator here, Thanks for the kind words
It's been a really harsh and long process to CAD this model, it's also really complex to change measurements for it.
As I do wish to have a simpler version for customizing, for now by taking people orders I might either build a new parametric model, or have a growing "bank" of models and measurements to share for free like the main version.
Poor Billie’s snoot! Glad you are such a caring owner.
Please consider the nickname “Tycho Brahe” for her.
Not a dog person but I read the story, believing the autoimmune disease was a bit of a dead end. So great to see she was durably healed!
Can you please make a very slightly longer to cover the mouth? My dog is an amazing scavenger, I've tried a lot of different things to stop him eating random food that upsets his stomach. Where we live people are neglectful or think throwing away random food is good for animals.
I got this for my dog. It annoys her a bit but I'm hoping she'll get used to it. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BF5C9VTY
This is the promise of tech and the hacker ethos that SV killed long ago.
Thank you.
y'alls dag look like vincent d'orinfino in The Salton Sea
Great write-up. Cute dog.
I'm glad the nose recovered too!
Hi there, Great question! In short - yes, it does provide a pretty universal fit.
I originally measured only Billie because she's my dog and had a problem. But after helping about 50 other dogs, I discovered that the measurements work for most dogs with this condition. So far, I've only needed 2 sizes to cover all cases.
Of course, no two noses are exactly the same, and there will always be minor adjustments that could make an even more perfect fit - just like with any human clothing item. But the core design works well across different dogs.
I'd love to eventually offer truly custom fits for every dog, but for now, this approach has been effective for everyone I've worked with.
Your comment was written by AI, you should mention that somewhere
Do you have proof? A hunch? Quality issues that detracted from the article?
I despise AI slop, but this is a great article and a worthy cause. If AI was used, and helped make this article a reality, then the author did a great job of guiding the AI, and doing quality checks.
The article is cool; there's no doubt. But it could have been written without AI, and it would be better to write the article in human voice than to proliferate AI slop. Is it really so horrible to take the time to write things ourselves?
If you read this article and don't observe the tells of AI content, you have a problem (or maybe you don't, because no one cares anymore).
The tells in this article: There are lots of parts that look like AI - the specific pattern of lists, the "not this but that", particular phrases that are relatively unlikely.
For example, the strange parallelism here (including the rhyming endings): "Sunscreen balms – Licked off immediately Fabric nose shields – She rubbed them off constantly Keeping her indoors – Reduced her quality of life drastically Reapplying medication constantly – Exhausting and ineffective" The style is cloying and unnatural.
"That solution didn't exist. So we decided to create it."
"For the holidays, I even made her a bright pink version, giving her a fashionable edge." -- wtf is a fashionable edge? A fashionable edge over what?
"I realized this wasn't just Billie's story—it was a problem affecting dogs everywhere."
Sure these could just be cliche style (and increasingly we will probably see that as the AI garbage infects the writing style of actual humans), but they look like AI. It's not as bad as some, but it's there.
Everyone should be disclosing the use of AI. And every time someone uses AI, he should say "I don't care enough about you the reader to actually put the time into writing this myself."
No 2025 HN thread is complete without someone accusing someone else of using AI or someone using the word "slop".
Bullet points? Must be AI. Em-dash? Obviously slop. Not only this, but that? Holy moly, AI slop.
(we ignore whether or not the writing is actually interesting, engaging, educational, etc. of course)
As someone who often wrote with bullet points, emoticons, some extra formatting, or dashes - albeit using the hyphen (incorrectly, I've learned) and not the em- - (:P) some LLM-generated text uses these things very liberally and much differently than most people did before. I didn't always have reactions like this, but after being baited by enough garbage search engine results and the like, I'm now often put off very quickly after noticing these patterns. And frankly, seeing it just makes it not feel worth it to continue reading and try to guess at what the person's actual ideas and thoughts are.
This isn't an issue. People frequently repost old stuff. Some get repeated almost every year.
Warning, pictures in the article might be unpleasant to see.
Serious question: should the whole internet have content warnings for anything that might be found objectionable by someone? This seems super mild. Maybe embed it in site metadata, and then you specify your preferred experience in your browser of choice?
This was already tried literally decades ago[0].
Now answer some questions:
what should happen when some objectionable people would access a site what doesn't have anything in the site metadata?
what should happen when some very objectionable people would access a site what do have all the required data in the site metadata and they would still complain?
Also you are clearly missing the usual "think about the children" drivel.
[0] eg https://www.isumsoft.com/internet/enable-content-advisor-in-...
If you find these pictures distressing, you might want to consider consciously and carefully exposing yourself to more of the same to build a minimal amount of tolerance. I’m pretty sure it’s literally impossible to go through life without experiencing (sometimes personally) medical conditions that are significantly more visually unpleasant. I’m not a huge fan of the meat-creature-universe we all rolled, but it literally is what it is.
Yes; that's my point. Is there a way of making the internet better, such that this can be handled more seamlessly, so that the people impacted by things that others find mild can just...avoid it?
Not all internet has a landing page where someone can post a "trigger warning" (for lack of a better term). Nor should it: trigger warnings don't work, and may even be harmful.
If the creator is reading this, please consider releasing the files under an open source license (such as gpl or cc-by-sa) so others can improve on the design and share those improvements.