2a. Pick your library or research searching source. Google Scholar and ResearchGate are pretty accessible. Research Gate even lets you ask people for help if you’re struggling to find studies relevant to your interest!
2b. If you’re at a university or school, your library might have access to articles behind a paywall. Go forth, before you lose that information!
3. Filter by date to read the latest bits of literature, as things from 30 years ago will be referenced if still relevant and ignored if not. Peer reviewed articles are nice, as are commissioned independent reports that review the assorted literature to give you launch points.
5. Read it. The whole thing. I already read this and others, back in 2017, when I was considering docking my dog for medical reasons (pictures are under cuts)
Here’s some choice bits of information I got from this report, and a few others, while I was thinking about if I should go the plunge to dock my dog (spoiler: decided against and it healed up, no repeat since!)
Does tail docking have the potential to cause significant pain or distress in the case of puppies under 4 days of age?
To understand how behavioural responses to pain (OP note: aka “the puppy was more upset over being picked up!”) may be misleading, two phenomena need to be appreciated:
Firstly, sometimes responses like vocalizations and struggling may be shown in response to handling alone. These responses are more vehement in animals not used to human handling or that are from species that are naturally demonstrative (…) It has been shown that the intensity of response is higher when a painful procedure occurs rather than handling alone or a sham procedure.
Secondly, some species, including dogs (Hellyer et al, 2007), tend to be stoic even when they experience considerable pain. (…) “Neonates have intact neural pathways for pain transmission, but both neonates and senior animals may not express their pain as plainly as other animals” (pg. 472, Hellyer et al., 2007). Therefore, passive coping should not be mistaken for the absence of pain given the potential anatomical basis for welfare being compromised, and the demonstration of active pain-related behaviours by some docked puppies (Noonan et al, 1996).
Factors that increase the likelihood of passive responding include prior experience of gentle handling (Muns et al, 2015) and being rapidly returned to the dam where they are able to suckle (Blass et al., 1995; Johnston et al, 2008). Essentially, a puppy returned quickly to the dam is not motivated to escape or alert the dam to their distress, and they have access to anti-inflammatory environment including heat and nursing. Research that better characterises how neonatal puppies experience and express nociception and pain, and factors influencing these outcomes, would be informative. It is likely that careful and expert breeders minimise the disturbance to the puppies and the potential distress caused by tail docking, but it is not plausible that the procedure is rendered completely safe and reliably harmless.
6. Think about what you’re reading.
Does it conflict with things you think you know? Or have been told? Are there conflicted sources of information? What is most current and reviewed? Are you concerned that you might have been doing the wrong thing through outdated knowledge? Are you worried if you change your perspective, friends with your old perspective may reject you? If you read up more on this topic, do you think your view might change? How do you think it might actually change you? Why is your view so important to you? How can you find out more? (See step 1)
And already mentioned, surgeries performed early in life without analgesia make animals more pain-sensitive and anxious (Matthews, 2005). For this reason the best age for performing a tail dock, when the procedure is appropriate, is a decision that should be made on a case-by-case basis.
It may do them pain now and put them at heightened risk of complications directly related and pain sensitive risks, but are there other potential complications?
In some cases there is evidence that tail docking, even when not acutely painful, may lead to chronic health conditions (LaPrarie et al, 2010). Some dogs may begin to self-mutilate after tail docking, and this behaviour is related to the presence of neuromas (Gross & Carr, 1990). Neuromas are nerve formations that may develop after nerves are severed, and they are associated with increased sensitivity to pain and chronic pain.
I don’t know if you guys noticed, but I’m a major fan of physical ability. I got upset over my dog’s whiskers being shaved because aside from looking stupid, it affected his ability to accurately judge his jumping! So I also looked into how the tail loss my affect my very active and large dog.
and personally, being that my docking-candidate is an undersocialised unskilled rescue mutt, I had some concerns relating to her ability to adequately communicate with the few dogs I let her meet:
In particular, the tail is known to convey crucial
information on motivational state and intent through
complex interactions of its movement, position and
size (Leaver & Reimchen 2008; Artelle et al. 2011). The
position and motion of dog’s tail provide information
including friendliness, playfulness, fear, submission,
dominance and aggression (Wansborough 1996; Coren
2000). Quaranta et al. (2007) found that dogs wag
their tails asymmetrically as a function of their motivational
state. When dogs see a tail wagging to the
right they are more relaxed, when the wag is to the
left they become more stressed (Artelle et al. 2011).
Tails are important both in visual and olfactory signalling
because they carry scent glands (Hughes 1998).
(Let’s be honest, my dog needs all the help she can get and the tail is part of that)
But what about working dogs? Well, there’s studies for that too! Here’s the most pro-docking yet recent one I could find:
Investigations regarding tail injuries in working gundogs and terriers in pest control in Scotland (2014)
The main findings of study one on 2860 dogs were a clear predisposition for tail injury in spaniels (17.8%) and hunt point retrievers (HPR; 15.6%), especially if undocked. Terriers and pointers/setters were at least risk in this population. Being docked by more than one third did not appear to infer increased protection from tail injury compared to a one-third dock. Between 10 and 30 (OP note: ACTIVELY WORKING) spaniel or HPR puppies would need to be docked to one-third to avoid one tail injury examined at a veterinary practice.
At a glance, I guess we could squint and be like “hah, see! we prevented injury!”
Tail injuries were mainly tail tip injuries and lacerations elsewhere on the tail, they were mainly sustained during work related activities and were mainly caused by brambles and gorse. While 13.5% of all dogs in the survey sustained a tail injury, 9.8% of dogs also sustained injuries to other parts of the body.
It appears that tail injury is rarely observed usually easily treated. Tail docking puppies seems a severe method of preventing such injuries when only 13.8% had injuries or 0.12% of dogs visiting vet clinics require tail amputation.
When we bring in the rest of the dog community aka the pets and show dogs done for arbitrarily decided standards that are a few decades old but claim to be older:
Veterinary practice data showed that 0.59% of dogs had sustained a tail injury, with a significantly higher prevalence (0.90%) in working dog breeds than in non-working dog breeds (0.53%)
I’m a bit sad the latest bit of the study didn’t meet testing standards, but it still poses questions:
The third, prospective, study could not be conducted as planned due to poor compliance. Therefore only minimal analyses were performed and only few deductions can be made, including that the majority of tail injuries were caused by brambles, gorse and fern, were sustained during work and training, and were almost exclusively tail tip injuries. A minority of tail injuries (between 10% and 12%) were reported as having been examined by a veterinarian.
One study showed a clear association between acquired incompetence of the urethral sphincter in both dogs and bitches to an overrepresentation of docked breeds, specifically the Old English Sheepdog, Rottweiler, Doberman Pinscher, Weimaraner and Irish Setter (Holt & Thrusfield 1993Holt PE, Thrusfield MV. 1993.
(That’s not the only study, just the one with the easiest to paste quote because I am lazy)
WAIT, I haven’t viewed any more research into tail docking since I successfully healed my dog! What if there’s new stuff? Okay back to the first few steps and tailor my search to exclude farm animals…there’s nothing new for me there, but still worth reading up on things.
Anyway, that’s an example of how we keep up to date on latest literature so we don’t say stupid shit like “they don’t feel it”, “it prevents injury scratches”, it’s “hygienic”, “it’s the breed standard which has changed so many times” or “i’m a super tough person who’s going to post amputated puppy tails at the general international populace and make jokes about their possibility as keychains to show what a real true blue serious dog owner i am”.
Versus real reasons that should be discussed with your vet to have it done in a pain controlled and hygienic manner on a case by case basis.
To help ease on the overload of information, here’s my undocked english springer spaniel getting hit in the face by the tail of my tail-injury-recovered mutt:
and my next spaniel, which comes from multi-use lines, will be undocked too 🙂 because I owe it to my dogs to keep myself as on top on as much research as humanely possible to ensure I am continually improving on their health, their care, their management.
Hope this was interesting and informative for anyone who read all that! To anyone who didn’t. Well. Fine.
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