Hi Penny, I remember you and your beautiful pack from a previous forum.
About 10 or so years ago we had a beagle who started getting growths like that when she was around 10 years old. Her then vet would remove them under anesthesia and send them to a lab. The results were always the same, "benign fatty tumors." Due to the high cost of these "operations," around $400 to $600 each time I took her for removal, I eventually decided to only have only the fatty tumors that were vulnerable to getting bumped removed, or ones that were getting quite large. For example, she had one on the end of her tail that would bleed whenever she wagged her tail and it hit the floor or a wall, and of course that one had to be removed. We moved to a different local sometime after that tail fatty tumor was removed and of course we began seeing another vet. When a fatty tumor near her ear began to bleed if she scratched her ear with her hind foot, I took her into our new vet. He read her medical records and decided to tie this tumor off. He showed me exactly how to do it and suggested I could do some of the other ones, as long as they had a "neck." After about 4 or 5 days, it turns black and falls off, leaving a small scab. You dab it daily with rubbing alcohol to keep it clean before it falls off. It takes two people to tie one off, one to hold the dog and the other to tie the NOT mint flavored dental floss around the neck, as close to the skin as possible. The vet said that the tumors that had no neck would have to be done by surgery in his hospital. I sort of remember that he said the fatty tumors were caused by a virus that older dogs are vulnerable to.
