A tale of some broken tails
Paws & Claws Malcolm Anderson
Tails come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and they perform all sorts of functions. There’s the wide, flat beaver tail for propelling them through the water. Then there are long, skinny, prehensile, or grabby, monkey tails.
Some reptiles even have detachable tails so they can escape if someone finds them a bit tasty. Whatever happened to our tails in the evolutionary path? That would be a laugh.
This week has been a week for tail problems.
Fizzle trotted in to the hospital this week and proceeded to repaint our walls like someone with an out-of-control spray gun. Poor old Fizzle – cool name – is a 3-year-old male retired greyhound, who had caught the end of his long, whippy tail in a door that closed in the wind.
He was happy to see us and while wagging or whipping his tail from side to side and up and down, he was doing a good job of redecorating a path to the consulting rooms with a fine spray of blood from a large cut to the end of his tail. Greyhounds are nice-natured dogs and make great pets, although their strong chasing instinct can put a cat’s life in danger.
Like all my patients, Fizzle wasn’t going to lie still while I put local anaesthetic in his tail, so we soon had him asleep and monitored in the surgery.
Greyhounds are also different because they are what we call a ‘‘lean’’ breed and it is vitally important they and other such breeds receive special drugs for anaesthetics, so these anaesthetics are safer and not prolonged.
The cut to Fizzle’s tail required a lot of fine stitches after we stopped the bleeding, but that is not always the end of the story. These cases can be difficult to manage, as the patient continues to wag his tail and bang the end.
We put a hard, open-ended plastic sheath over the tip and a wide Elizabethan (lampshade) collar around his neck, and after 14 days his tail will be back to normal.
Other patients are not so lucky, such as Sooty. Sooty is, as expected, a black male 6-year-old cat.
He was rushed in late at night this week after coming home with facial abrasions, a wobbly back end and a floppy tail.
After first stabilising his condition overnight we were able to X-ray his pelvis and tail the next day. His injuries are common in cat versus car cases.
His pelvis had several fractures and his tail vertebrae had been slightly pulled apart at the base of his tail. His pelvic fractures, as in most cat cases, amazingly, will heal in several weeks, with cage confinement. The tail injury is a different story.
The theory is that the car wheel goes over the tail and, as the cat keeps going forwards, the tail is pulled at the base. It is a common injury for cats.
But, the nerves that control the ability to urinate and pass faeces come off the spine close to the base of the tail and the nerves can be irreversibly damaged.
So it is important to hospitalise these animals to make sure they can pass faeces and urinate voluntarily. Luckily Sooty was OK and within days his face was looking a lot better and he was going to the toilet.
His tail is paralysed, but it’s not causing him discomfort, so we have chosen to leave it at present.
A lot of these cases do gain some function in their tails and are able to lift them, so we will keep checking on his progress over the next four to eight weeks.
Tail amputations are only sometimes necessary, as, for instance, for Maggie, a classic British bulldog. These little tanks often have short corkscrew tails, which, as in Maggie’s case, can bend the wrong way and cause discomfort and infection.
With a little plastic surgery and removal of a few skin folds she was back to her normal grunting, snoring self. Tails are awesome communicators. A large rottie came in to see me this week and I instantly made friends with him and was patting him. It was so easy to tell he was happy and friendly – he was wagging his big thick tail like a big playful black and tan labrador.
Jack russells and fox terriers have awesome tails too. I have had a fantastic week meeting some amazing people with their four-legged friends.
I want to take the time to thank them for their stories and making every day a special one.
My job is as much about helping and meeting people as it is about their fourlegged friends.