[yorkietalkjilly]

As a child I think I was marked for life by the 1 1/2 year battle of a dog that frequented our neighborhood and that lived with a broken and rebroken and gnawed tail, which would partially heal, get re-injured, get really gross a few times, swell, leak pus, etc. and the dog would disappear for a while(we never knew where he lived), reappear with the tail partially hanging, looking better, hardly swollen, and then you would see him again with it freshly re-broken, all swollen up, all red in the area around break, missing hair there, and he would endlessly gnaw on it. I tried over and over to get him to stop, come to me to I could get him to Mother, but he'd just run off, stop and chew. The break just apparently never healed and I'm sure he got no vet care. His chewing on it didn't help either! He was very skinny so I don't even know if he belonged to anyone. Us kids in the neighborhood would throw him cookies and bread and things we could get from our moms. Eventually, I guess somebody tried to amputate his tail or it rotted or fell off, leaving the bone exposed and the skin withdrew from the end.

That dog suffered so much with that awful mess of a tail. He had a very thin tail carried low and out and I never did know where he came from or whose he was or what ever happened to him. But after his tail was gone, he only came around a few times more and then never came again. We always called him the ghost dog because he was white, we never knew when he would come, where he came from or where he would go. But he would stay in the neighborhood for a couple of days at a time when he came and then go. Nobody near by had a dog like that or let their dogs out of their yards.

I now know that most tail injuries are slow to heal due to the constant motion and often not much blood supply, and that he probably had osteomyelitis in site of the broken bone of the tail and with little blood or nerve supply in that thin tail, it just wouldn't heal and then he'd get in a fight or who knows but he'd get it re-broken. I saw enough of his suffering with it as a little kid who loved dogs to just about drive me nuts. He wouldn't let you catch him or even come close to you but he'd show up from time to time with that thing so red and so swollen and all gnawed looking, that it stuck with me forever. Even subconsciously.

Except for two GSD's, I always had dogs with tails docked at infancy once I grew up and got my own dogs. I wasn't even conscious of it until recently but every single dog I had in my life except our early GSD's(my husband wanted those) had docked tails. I guess it was my subconscious thinking that by getting a dog that had had a minimal procedure done as an infant before it had either vascular or neurological maturity in the tail sure beat what that poor dog went through years back. Things really bad like that stay with you. I guess I always ensured myself I'd never have to see a bad tail injury happen to one of my dogs as I always chose those with short tails. Course if that happened to a dog of mine, he'd be at the vet in a heartbeat but still, I subsciously apparently ensured myself it was an injury I'd likely never have to see again by only getting dogs with very short tails. Still I know that not all dogs in this day and time with broken or injured tails get any vet care and shudder, thinking of that old dog and his awful tail trouble.