Tail docking.

[Neil Cooney. 1]

I was disscussing tail docking yesterday with a friend and just out of curiosity I was wondering,

In the UK whats the procedure a vet uses to dock a tail, does he use a local aneastetic on a 5 day old pup?

Have any of you concerns about bringing an un-innoculated litter of 5 day old pups to a vets surgery?

Has there been any cases of a vet making a balls of a pups tail ie. too short.

[skycat 6,174]

I've just had a litter of pups done at my own vet at 3 days old, which is always when I used to do it. I held the pups and showed the vet exactly where I wanted them docked. No local: unnecessary and local anaesthetic also slows down healing in all circumstances.

 

Regarding taking pups to a surgery, yes, I didn't like it either, but the pups were never in contact with anything other than the vet's sterilised hands, my hands or the basket I took them in there with. At this age they should have very good maternal immunity anyway, and providing the bitch 's immune system is OK there shouldn't be a problem.

 

I wouldn't have let the vet take them out of my sight and dock them in another room though, and I'm lucky I've been using the same vet for 20 years so they know what I'm like! LOL

[Neil Cooney. 1]

So no local. Did the vet use a sterilized blade on a sterilized suface?

Same as what I did last week.

[skycat 6,174]

Scissors from an autoclave: I've always used slightly blunt scissors: as in still sharp but not scalpel sharp: no bleeding at all like that.