Comment on Coaxed into inhumane cosmetic dog decisions
insanemantis@lemmy.world 3 weeks agoBro I’m a grown man and didn’t even know about tail docking until probably months ago
Saw this lady in an elevator with a dog, and the dog had no damn tail
Anyway I was like “umm is your dog okay??” And she just gives the most nonchalant, indifferent explanation, she’s like “ohh yeah her tail got docked~” and I’m just thinking wtf is she even implying here. I had to google what that even meant later because it didn’t even occur to me that she actually had that dog’s tail removed on purpose
I assumed that she meant that the tail was diseased somehow and had to be amputated, like maybe docking is just emergency tail amputation- BUT NO AARRGGH I hate this planet
Idk if this makes it any better but docking started as a practice for dogs doing certain jobs to help avoid injury.
Basically tail injuries were common and a clean removal was overall actually better. Then it slowly became something done for no purpose other than cosmetic which is disgusted. Honestly we shouldn’t even have working dogs anymore either, but at least its origins made sense at the time
The injuries were related to the dog’s job
That’s like if people work at a candy factory but people keep injuring their thumbs on the candy making machine, but instead of making the machine safer we just cut off their thumbs
These dogs weren’t running factories they were chasing vermin and helping in hunting. The wild animal will fight, but both jobs were necessary for survival and impossible to redesign at the time.
But we have invented new ways meaning that dogs are no longer required for these jobs. This should have been when docking was abandoned
I’m going a step further, because you know tail docking is as old as 2,000 years ago? People didn’t even know that animals felt pain
I don’t know much about the details, but here’s what makes me suspicious: didn’t dogs already chase and hunt before domestication?
And, you’re telling me that only after humans make a job out of it, it becomes something that injures their tails?
This is why the factory analogy starts to make sense, because clearly there is something that was put in place, that we imposed on the dogs. Something changed, from the wilderness to their jobs, that make chasing and hunting less safe for them
And instead of doing the responsible thing and making it safe by idk, fixing the thing that injures their tails? No, no too hard, no let’s just fucking cut off the entire thing
I mean that’s just so dramatic
There is a chance that it was not the owner’s choice necessarily, as it could have been a prior owner/breeder. Although in all likelihood it may well have been the owner that decided to dock her dog’s tail.
Wait when you read about ear-cropping, then, it is even more sick. Both docking and ear-cropping are forbidden in most of Europe, since both are animal abuse, and should only be performed, if there is some actual health problem (like tail breaking, or something). Both are widely practiced in the USA, for looks.
frostedtrailblazer@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
There is a chance that it was not the owner’s choice necessarily, as it could have been a prior owner/breeder. Although in all likelihood it may well have been the owner that decided to dock her dog’s tail.