Queries about cat’s wound

Hi, I would greatly appreciate any help to understand the cause of my cat’s wound. The background is that we had two male cats (both 6 years old) at our home in China. They constantly fought each other and one of the cats often got bitten by the other. Recently(more than a month ago) we found a bitten wound with a more serious looking than it normally appear to be. We hence sent the cat to a vet and they urged to perform a surgery. They said it was necessary to do such surgery of skin+tissue removal but after watching their operation video I highly doubt if it is absolutely necessary. To my understanding the structure inside the wound does not look anything like necrosis or any other serious spreading inflammation. The surgery ended with removal of approximately 1/8 of the entire skin of the cat. Given the severely less regulated vet system in China we very much question if they really had a valid reason for such an operation and if the operation is absolutely necessary. On the day of the surgery and before the surgery took place, the cat was taken a blood test too. The cat was indicated with warning low platelets count, and the vet still performed sterilization along with the wound surgery, which I also think is wrong-doing given the potential risk of bleeding combined with low platelets count.   I have attached the picture of the wound before the surgery, a recorded video of the wound during surgery and the cut after the surgery.   The cat died less than a month after the treatment. He has always been a valuable member of our family and we are very sad of this incident. We do want to know if a potential mistreatment (unnecessary surgery) actually took place and as we still have another cat to care for, we need to understand a bit better what is needed and what is not. We would greatly appreciate if anyone could shed some knowledge on the likely situation of our cat’s wound. 

Hello and thank you for this complicated query; I'm so sorry to hear what happened to your cat.  The first thing to say is that I am a stranger on the internet (albeit a qualified one) and the only things I know about your cat are what you have told me.  However, based on that, he seems to have had a deep, infected penetrating wound.  Infected because teeth are usually covered in bacteria.  During a deep bite, the teeth 'inject' those bacteria into the victim's deep tissues, which are of course proteinaceous and moist - indeed, exactly the right conditions for bacteria to grow.  Cats' teeth are known to carry particularly noxious bacteria (I suppose this carries an evolutionary advantage in that it helps to bring victims down if the bite itself is not fatal).  For good measure, the teeth inflict a certain force, which damages the tissues and helps the bacteria to enter.  A bite wound is thereby a recipe for deep, penetrating infection that passes into the blood and also spreads fast locally.  It is quite common that a small entry wound on the surface - with or without some bruising - is all that can be seen at first.  Cats are furry, so these wounds are frequently missed or undersestimated at surface level. When I was on a supplementary emergency medicine course a few years ago, we were taught that the only way to treat these was by aggressive resection (cutting away) of the dead, infected tissue along with antibiotics; that treatment is frequently unsuccessful.  It is common practise for dead skin to be removed; it heals over a large gap a little at a time.  Therefore, it is my opinion that the vet may have been doing their very best and that, if they had known the extent of the wound at the outset, might have issued a guarded prognosis.