Tail Docking – Does Tail Docking Affect a Dog’s Behaviour
Scotty Valadao - Friends of the Dog
If we look at the history of tail docking, we will find that it was done as a means of protection in working dog breeds to avoid injury while working or hunting in the field. Apart from the pain that is caused, the possibility of infection and future health concerns, the balancing function of the tail is affected, as well as the function of the tail in swimming.
Many people say that the dog does not even notice that it does not have a tail. I find this very hard to comprehend as when one does TTouch on a dog that has had its tail docked, the ‘phantom limb’ phenomena is often seen, by way of the dog turning its head and looking behind with surprise if one runs one’s hand along the area where the tail would naturally have been if it had not been docked! This does not happen in all dogs with docked tails, but I have seen enough dogs react to this movement to know that the phantom limb/tail is a reality, just as I have seen a lot of ‘mis’ communication between dogs when a tail has been docked.
Personally, I firmly believe that when we dock a dog’s tail we take away an important part of the dog's ability to communicate, and this could lead to reactive behaviour. This is an area which still needs to be researched in depth and I have put below 2 articles relating to this subject that I came across while looking for information on this subject for you to read for yourself, as well as a link to the full pdf article for those of you that are interested
We all know that dog tails communicate information to other dogs and to people: happiness, friendliness, playfulness, fear, aggression, and status.
But what happens when the tail is artificially shortened (docked)? Are other dogs affected by this tail shortening? In the United States at least, more than one third of all dog breeds have traditionally had their tails docked. What does this do to dog body language?
This is been a difficult question to answer scientifically because experiments have been so hard to perform. If you're using live dogs with short and long tails to study this question, you have a lot of factors other than tail length that could confuse the issue. You have all kinds of body scents, ear positions, general body posture, and behavioral interactions that can modify the response of other dogs to short or long tails.
A recent behavioral tool has been to use robots to study the behavior of other animals. With a robot you can test for specific things, such as a short tail versus a long tail on a dog, and everything else stays constant: the robot is still the same size, stays in the same position, doesn't have any confusing smells, and doesn't engage in any behaviors that could modify the response of an approaching animal.
Using a robot, a study has recently looked at the effect of short and long tails on the approach behavior of other dogs (Leaver, S.D.A. and T.E. Reimchen. 2008. Behavioural responses of Canis familiaris to different tail lengths of a remotely-controlled life-sized dog replica. Behaviour 145:377-390).
The experimenters did this study in a place where there are a lot of off-leash dogs in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. They used a robot about the size of a Labrador retriever, and attached to the robot either a short tail (9 cm or 3.5 in) or a long tail (30 cm or 12 in). Using a servo mechanism, they could make the tail either wag or stand still. They videotaped the approaches of 492 off-leash dogs and assessed the conditions under which the dogs either freely approached the robot or hesitated in their approach.
They divided the approaching dogs into two categories: smaller dogs (those whose shoulder was below the shoulder of the robot) and larger dogs (those whose shoulder was above the shoulder of the robot).
They found that the dogs differed in their approach to a short tail versus a long tail.
Both larger and smaller dogs tended to approach the robot without hesitation when the robot had a long, wagging tail, and tended to hesitate more when the long tail was motionless. We might expect this because a wagging tail generally signals friendliness while a motionless tail can signal potential aggression.
On the other hand, both larger and smaller dogs seemed to have a difficult time determining whether the short tail was wagging or still. Both the larger and smaller dogs tended to approach either the wagging short tail or the still short tail at about the same rate, a rate that was below the rate of approach for a long wagging tail and above the rate of approach for a motionless long tail.
It was as if the dogs couldn't see the difference between a wagging short tail or a motionless one and had to make a guess as to whether to approach or not.
So it seems that tail docking does introduce some confusion into dog language, making it more difficult for dogs to determine whether a dog with a short tail is friendly or potentially aggressive.
Fortunately for dogs, the practice of tail docking seems to be decreasing in frequency, allowing more dogs with normal-sized tails to be able to accurately communicate their intentions to other dogs.
--Con Slobodchikoff
Study Finds Tail Docking Creates Aggressive Dogs
Published on March 25, 2008 by Ryan O'Meara
Dogs with docked tails are more likely to be involved in aggressive exchanges with other dogs according to new research.
Scientists at the University of Victoria in Vancouver, Canada studied a robotic dog with a mechanical back-end and detachable tail and studied how 492 dogs reacted to the robo-dog, with tail and without.
They found dogs approached a dog with a docked tail more nervously than with the full tail attached.
These findings, whilst it has to be said can’t be considered conclusive given the use of a robo-dog in the first place, tend to bear out what many canine behaviour experts have thought for decades – that a dog’s tail is an essential tool in its ability to communicate properly with other canines.
The university’s biologist Tom Reimchen said
“Think of it this way, what type of teenager would you get if everyone approached him saying, ‘I don’t trust you’? What type of personality would emerge from that? It could be the same in dogs.”
Many dogs are docked for no other reason than to meet a breed standard. In other words, there is no particular medical or safety reason for the dock, it is purely cosmetic. This research would give more weight to the suggestion that docked dogs are at a disadvantage when it comes to their ability to convey their emotions to other animals and indeed people.
“Our research does show a possible connection between losing that signal and losing the ability to communicate with a potential increase in aggression,” said Reimchen.
Dock your dog’s tail, and you run the risk of making it more aggressive. So say two University of Victoria scientists after observing how 492 real-life dogs reacted to a robotic dog with and without a docked tail.
UVic biologist Tom Reimchen and graduate student Steve Leaver wanted to find out what effect cutting off a dog’s tail might have on its behaviour and the way other dogs behave around it. What they discovered was that dogs will approach a dog with a docked tail more cautiously than they will a dog with a complete tail. And that, says Reimchen, could make the dog with a docked tail more aggressive.
“Think of it this way,” he says. “What type of teenager would you get if everyone approached him saying, ‘I don’t trust you’? What type of personality would emerge from that? It could be the same in dogs.”
These findings, based on a series of observations made in the summer of 2006, are published in the latest edition of Behaviour magazine, a European science journal dedicated to the study of animal and human behaviour.
Reimchen hypothesized that if a dog lacks a tail, arguably the most important communication tool it has when it comes to relating to other dogs, its behaviour could be negatively affected. To test that hypothesis, Leaver outfitted a toy dog with a motor in its hindquarters that would wag — or not — one of two artificial tails Leaver could attach to its rear end. The first tail was 30 centimetres long, roughly the length of a normal tail, and the second was nine centimetres, roughly the length of a docked tail.
Then Leaver took the robo-dog, which resembled a black lab, to a number of off-leash parks in the Victoria area to observe how real dogs reacted to it.
“When the long tail was wagging, then other dogs would approach (the robo-dog) in a confident friendly way,” Leaver said in an interview. “But when the tail was still and upright, they were less likely to approach, and if they did, it was in a less confident way.”
That, he said, was consistent with normal dog behaviour. In dog “language” a wagging tail usually means “come play with me,” while a stiff, upright tail usually means “stay away” or at least “approach with care.”
But when Leaver fixed the shorter tail to the toy dog, real dogs were more likely to believe that discretion was the better part of valour and approach it warily, Reimchen said, regardless of whether the shorter tail was wagging.
“Without a tail, whether it was wagging or not, it was closer to the situation where the [long] tail was upright and still,” he said.
So, Reimchen surmises, if a puppy’s tail is cut off when it’s two or three days old, as is often done by breeders of such dogs as Doberman pinschers and Rottweilers for purely cosmetic reasons, it’s possible that that puppy’s experiences with other dogs will be affected for the rest of its life. And that could lead to the dog becoming more remote and aggressive.
“Our research does show a possible connection between losing that signal and losing the ability to communicate with a potential increase in aggression,” he said.
A dog that lacks the ability to express its intentions with its tail may have to resort to other methods, Leaver says, such as growling, lunging or even biting. Or a dog that is always treated as if it were something to beware of, Reimchen says, may become a dog to beware of.
“It’s not rocket science,” he explained. “Suppose you have a group of 10 puppies, and two of them have their tails chopped off. If we look at those two puppies minute by minute, day by day, and how not being able to signal with their tails is going to affect them, my thinking is that this could lead to a personality that is more cautious and eventually more aggressive.”
For opponents of tail docking, the UVic research is one more reason for Canada to follow the lead of Britain, several European nations and Australia and ban or at least limit the practice here.
Said Peter Fricker of the Vancouver Humane Society: “Tail docking is just cosmetic surgery and it’s totally unnecessary. It can be a painful procedure and it removes one of the dog’s key ways of communicating.”
Many people say that the dog does not even notice that it does not have a tail. I find this very hard to comprehend as when one does TTouch on a dog that has had its tail docked, the ‘phantom limb’ phenomena is often seen, by way of the dog turning its head and looking behind with surprise if one runs one’s hand along the area where the tail would naturally have been if it had not been docked! This does not happen in all dogs with docked tails, but I have seen enough dogs react to this movement to know that the phantom limb/tail is a reality, just as I have seen a lot of ‘mis’ communication between dogs when a tail has been docked.
Personally, I firmly believe that when we dock a dog’s tail we take away an important part of the dog's ability to communicate, and this could lead to reactive behaviour. This is an area which still needs to be researched in depth and I have put below 2 articles relating to this subject that I came across while looking for information on this subject for you to read for yourself, as well as a link to the full pdf article for those of you that are interested
We all know that dog tails communicate information to other dogs and to people: happiness, friendliness, playfulness, fear, aggression, and status.
But what happens when the tail is artificially shortened (docked)? Are other dogs affected by this tail shortening? In the United States at least, more than one third of all dog breeds have traditionally had their tails docked. What does this do to dog body language?
This is been a difficult question to answer scientifically because experiments have been so hard to perform. If you're using live dogs with short and long tails to study this question, you have a lot of factors other than tail length that could confuse the issue. You have all kinds of body scents, ear positions, general body posture, and behavioral interactions that can modify the response of other dogs to short or long tails.
A recent behavioral tool has been to use robots to study the behavior of other animals. With a robot you can test for specific things, such as a short tail versus a long tail on a dog, and everything else stays constant: the robot is still the same size, stays in the same position, doesn't have any confusing smells, and doesn't engage in any behaviors that could modify the response of an approaching animal.
Using a robot, a study has recently looked at the effect of short and long tails on the approach behavior of other dogs (Leaver, S.D.A. and T.E. Reimchen. 2008. Behavioural responses of Canis familiaris to different tail lengths of a remotely-controlled life-sized dog replica. Behaviour 145:377-390).
The experimenters did this study in a place where there are a lot of off-leash dogs in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. They used a robot about the size of a Labrador retriever, and attached to the robot either a short tail (9 cm or 3.5 in) or a long tail (30 cm or 12 in). Using a servo mechanism, they could make the tail either wag or stand still. They videotaped the approaches of 492 off-leash dogs and assessed the conditions under which the dogs either freely approached the robot or hesitated in their approach.
They divided the approaching dogs into two categories: smaller dogs (those whose shoulder was below the shoulder of the robot) and larger dogs (those whose shoulder was above the shoulder of the robot).
They found that the dogs differed in their approach to a short tail versus a long tail.
Both larger and smaller dogs tended to approach the robot without hesitation when the robot had a long, wagging tail, and tended to hesitate more when the long tail was motionless. We might expect this because a wagging tail generally signals friendliness while a motionless tail can signal potential aggression.
On the other hand, both larger and smaller dogs seemed to have a difficult time determining whether the short tail was wagging or still. Both the larger and smaller dogs tended to approach either the wagging short tail or the still short tail at about the same rate, a rate that was below the rate of approach for a long wagging tail and above the rate of approach for a motionless long tail.
It was as if the dogs couldn't see the difference between a wagging short tail or a motionless one and had to make a guess as to whether to approach or not.
So it seems that tail docking does introduce some confusion into dog language, making it more difficult for dogs to determine whether a dog with a short tail is friendly or potentially aggressive.
Fortunately for dogs, the practice of tail docking seems to be decreasing in frequency, allowing more dogs with normal-sized tails to be able to accurately communicate their intentions to other dogs.
--Con Slobodchikoff
Study Finds Tail Docking Creates Aggressive Dogs
Published on March 25, 2008 by Ryan O'Meara
Dogs with docked tails are more likely to be involved in aggressive exchanges with other dogs according to new research.
Scientists at the University of Victoria in Vancouver, Canada studied a robotic dog with a mechanical back-end and detachable tail and studied how 492 dogs reacted to the robo-dog, with tail and without.
They found dogs approached a dog with a docked tail more nervously than with the full tail attached.
These findings, whilst it has to be said can’t be considered conclusive given the use of a robo-dog in the first place, tend to bear out what many canine behaviour experts have thought for decades – that a dog’s tail is an essential tool in its ability to communicate properly with other canines.
The university’s biologist Tom Reimchen said
“Think of it this way, what type of teenager would you get if everyone approached him saying, ‘I don’t trust you’? What type of personality would emerge from that? It could be the same in dogs.”
Many dogs are docked for no other reason than to meet a breed standard. In other words, there is no particular medical or safety reason for the dock, it is purely cosmetic. This research would give more weight to the suggestion that docked dogs are at a disadvantage when it comes to their ability to convey their emotions to other animals and indeed people.
“Our research does show a possible connection between losing that signal and losing the ability to communicate with a potential increase in aggression,” said Reimchen.
Dock your dog’s tail, and you run the risk of making it more aggressive. So say two University of Victoria scientists after observing how 492 real-life dogs reacted to a robotic dog with and without a docked tail.
UVic biologist Tom Reimchen and graduate student Steve Leaver wanted to find out what effect cutting off a dog’s tail might have on its behaviour and the way other dogs behave around it. What they discovered was that dogs will approach a dog with a docked tail more cautiously than they will a dog with a complete tail. And that, says Reimchen, could make the dog with a docked tail more aggressive.
“Think of it this way,” he says. “What type of teenager would you get if everyone approached him saying, ‘I don’t trust you’? What type of personality would emerge from that? It could be the same in dogs.”
These findings, based on a series of observations made in the summer of 2006, are published in the latest edition of Behaviour magazine, a European science journal dedicated to the study of animal and human behaviour.
Reimchen hypothesized that if a dog lacks a tail, arguably the most important communication tool it has when it comes to relating to other dogs, its behaviour could be negatively affected. To test that hypothesis, Leaver outfitted a toy dog with a motor in its hindquarters that would wag — or not — one of two artificial tails Leaver could attach to its rear end. The first tail was 30 centimetres long, roughly the length of a normal tail, and the second was nine centimetres, roughly the length of a docked tail.
Then Leaver took the robo-dog, which resembled a black lab, to a number of off-leash parks in the Victoria area to observe how real dogs reacted to it.
“When the long tail was wagging, then other dogs would approach (the robo-dog) in a confident friendly way,” Leaver said in an interview. “But when the tail was still and upright, they were less likely to approach, and if they did, it was in a less confident way.”
That, he said, was consistent with normal dog behaviour. In dog “language” a wagging tail usually means “come play with me,” while a stiff, upright tail usually means “stay away” or at least “approach with care.”
But when Leaver fixed the shorter tail to the toy dog, real dogs were more likely to believe that discretion was the better part of valour and approach it warily, Reimchen said, regardless of whether the shorter tail was wagging.
“Without a tail, whether it was wagging or not, it was closer to the situation where the [long] tail was upright and still,” he said.
So, Reimchen surmises, if a puppy’s tail is cut off when it’s two or three days old, as is often done by breeders of such dogs as Doberman pinschers and Rottweilers for purely cosmetic reasons, it’s possible that that puppy’s experiences with other dogs will be affected for the rest of its life. And that could lead to the dog becoming more remote and aggressive.
“Our research does show a possible connection between losing that signal and losing the ability to communicate with a potential increase in aggression,” he said.
A dog that lacks the ability to express its intentions with its tail may have to resort to other methods, Leaver says, such as growling, lunging or even biting. Or a dog that is always treated as if it were something to beware of, Reimchen says, may become a dog to beware of.
“It’s not rocket science,” he explained. “Suppose you have a group of 10 puppies, and two of them have their tails chopped off. If we look at those two puppies minute by minute, day by day, and how not being able to signal with their tails is going to affect them, my thinking is that this could lead to a personality that is more cautious and eventually more aggressive.”
For opponents of tail docking, the UVic research is one more reason for Canada to follow the lead of Britain, several European nations and Australia and ban or at least limit the practice here.
Said Peter Fricker of the Vancouver Humane Society: “Tail docking is just cosmetic surgery and it’s totally unnecessary. It can be a painful procedure and it removes one of the dog’s key ways of communicating.”
To read more on this subject please look at the following articles
NZVA TAIL DOCKING - RSPCA TAIL DOCKING - web.uvic.ca/~reimlab/robodog.pdf -
January 06, 2011 Size Of Tail Messes Up Dog Language -
NZVA TAIL DOCKING - RSPCA TAIL DOCKING - web.uvic.ca/~reimlab/robodog.pdf -
January 06, 2011 Size Of Tail Messes Up Dog Language -
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