Can dogs be born with half a tail?
Are All Dogs Born with Tails? Although most dogs are being born with long or small tails, some breeds may come into this world completely tailless like the Brittany Spaniel. In the beginning, all of the old and original dog breeds had tails but selective breeding and gene mutation altered this appearance.
What breed of dog has a white tipped tail?
The typical colors for a Basset are tan and white or black, tan and white. They have long thin slightly-curved tails with a white tip. Bassets were purposefully bred to have a white-tipped tail to help hunters locate their dogs during a hare hunt.
If your dog is born with a crooked tail, can you fix his tail?
Some dogs are born with congenital defects in the shape and length of their tails. As long as the abnormality is only found on the tail, the problem is only seen externally.
This would be a defect in the coccygeal vertebrae bones in the vertebral column close to the base of the tail. If a bone segment in the tail is dislocated, the tail becomes a somewhat crooked shape.
After birthing, many types of injury can lead to crooked & half tails. Road accidents, some human activities, and predators attacks are some of them
There are some treatments for fixing the crooked tail of a dog. These are artificial medical surgeries done by a veterinarian. These medical procedures can cause extreme pain and suffering to your innocent pet.
Surgery will also affect the dog’s natural behavior and be troublesome.
Such a procedure would require painful fracturing, amputation of part of the tail, or repositioning of the tail’s bones.
For all cases, channel a veterinarian. Do not try to do this procedure by yourself. Resetting the tail so the bones can regrow in alignment is one way to fix a tail. Your dog could need surgery and amputation of part of the tail in more severe cases.
Puppy Born with 6 Legs and 2 Tails Is Thriving
Dogs differ greatly in their morphological characteristics including various tail phenotypes. Congenitally short-tailed dogs are present in many breeds; however, the causative mutation located in the T-box transcription factor T gene (C189G) had only been described in the bobtailed Pembroke Welsh Corgis. We investigated here the presence of the T gene mutation in 23 other breeds (360 dogs, including 156 natural short tailed) in which natural bobtailed dogs exist. In the 17 breeds in which the C189G mutation was observed, there was a perfect correlation between this mutation and the short-tail phenotype. However, 6 breeds did not carry the known substitution or any other mutations in the T gene coding regions. No dogs were found to be homozygous for the C189G mutation, suggesting that the homozygous condition is lethal. In order to study the effect of the T gene mutation on litter size, we compared the number of puppies born from short-tailed parents to that born from long-tailed parents. In the Swedish Vallhund breed, we observed a 29% decrease in the litter size when both parents were short tailed. Given that the T gene mutation is not present in all breeds of short-tailed dog, there must be yet other genetic factors affecting tail phenotypes to be discovered.
Illustration of Bourbonnais Pointer dogs showing a tailless (anury) phenotype on the left, a short-tail (brachyury) phenotype in the middle, and a long-tail phenotype on the right (photo: Michaël Comte).
In Pembroke Welsh Corgis, the length of the natural bobtail varies from a complete tailless to a short tail with half the length of a normal tail and occasional kinks. For comparison, another likely recessively inherited type of bobtail exists in Bulldogs where all dogs in the breed have short tails with multiple kinks (Whitney 1947). There are also occasional reports of short-tailed dogs born from long-tailed parents in some breeds, revealing multiple patterns of inheritance or variations in penetrance.
We studied here the presence of the T gene mutation in a large number of breeds to investigate its possible ancestral origin and to identify whether other genetic causes exist in association with short tails. We tested 23 different breeds and showed that the C189G mutation is present in all short-tailed dogs of 17 breeds, supporting a correlation of mutation with the phenotype. We also showed that breeding of 2 bobtailed Swedish Vallhund dogs with the T gene mutation decreases litter size, which confirms a major role of T gene during embryogenesis.