Editor’s note: Dr. Lee Pickett has retired, but Creators continues to distribute columns from her archive. This one is from 2022. Q: Our Rottweiler has a docked tail, as do many dogs in the U.S. While ...

Ear and tail docking involve surgically removing part of a dog’s ears or tail. This practice, which has been around for centuries, originally aimed to prevent injuries in hunting and working dogs.

Q: Our Rottweiler has a docked tail, as do many dogs in the U.S. While watching a British dog show on television, I noticed that all the show dogs had natural, undocked tails. Why? A: Many countries ...

At one time, dogs weren’t pets. Instead, they had jobs and consequently had a docked tail. Dogs worked on farms and in the military and helped with hunting, fighting, ratting, and baiting. That’s not ...

Dogs that have undergone medical procedures to alter the shape of their ears or the length of their tails seem to acquire a certain combative appearance and there is some new data which suggests that ...

Two dying puppies dropped off at a Philadelphia animal hospital led to a Pennsylvania SPCA investigation that rescued 12 more dogs from two city properties, at one of which animals were undergoing ...

Q: Our Rottweiler has a docked tail, as do many dogs in the U.S. While watching a British dog show on television, I noticed that all the show dogs had natural, undocked tails. Why? A: Many countries ...

The dogs which most typically had their tails docked or their ears cropped were the "tough guys of dogdom", namely the guard dogs, fighters, and hunters. It is possible that the particular look which ...