Our experience with happy tail syndrome
When I started writing a post about happy tail in Great Danes I wanted to include our experience with it. The story grew a bit out of control so I wrote two posts. One post about what it is and what you can do and then this one with all the drama. If you want the Reader Digest version go to “Happy Tail is not as happy as it sounds”. This is the full length novel version, consider yourself warned.
Two of our four Great Danes suffered from happy tail injuries during their lives. Varel took it like her Romulan namesake, with no drama or complications. K’Ehleyr took it like a Klingon, with lots of blood, high winds, firestorm, evacuations and extreme measures.
Varel, first suffered happy tail when she wagged her tail against a rough stucco wall at her grandparent’s house. Once we were away from the house it healed just fine. She also injured it later in life while in our R-Pod travel trailer. The trailer had Venetian blinds. She would stand on the bed next to the door wagging her tail and hitting the blinds. Not only did it destroy the blinds but also cut open her tail and splattered blood all over the walls. The problem was solved by dumping the blinds for curtains
The bigger the better with K'Ehleyr
K’Ehleyr took happy tail to a different level, as she did with all things. She was crate trained when we adopted her so we continued that for a short time. When we came home she would wag her tail in the crate which broke the end of it open. The next option was to “crate” both girls in the hallway with baby gates. This mostly worked except the hallway is T-shaped so now she could hit her tail on the corner of the wall, break it open and spray blood everywhere. One day she hit is so hard that the hallway took on the look of a slaughter house, hopefully a forensics team never needs to come in here, I’ve heard that paint can’t hide blood, or maybe that is just on TV.
Bandages and vet wrap did the trick for Varel but as we know with K’Ehleyr nothing is simple. While K’Ehleyr’s tail was healing we took a trip to Baja and did our best to keep her tail clean and bandaged. Our mobile vet, who we were staying with in Baja, confirmed it was bandaged well and to continue doing what we were doing.
On the day we were scheduled to head home we awoke to extremely high winds, Santa Ana winds. Enough to create white caps and waves on the usually placid Gulf of California.
We were encouraged by our friends to stay but thought we needed to get back to our jobs by Monday. The strong winds made it a much longer drive with blowing sand making visibility measured in feet not miles. The road in Baja, Mex 5, is elevated about 8 feet above what used to be marsh and flood plains until the Colorado river was dammed off north of the border. Now there is just dried, cracked dirt on either side. Nevertheless, you don’t want to drive off the road. With all our attention on the road conditions, we never noticed that Varel was “helping” K’Ehleyr’s tail by licking her bandage while we drove.
We should have stayed in Baja longer
Turns out we didn’t need to get back for work the next day because we were in an evacuation area. Welcome to the Witch Fire of 2007 in San Diego. Upwards to 500,000 people were evacuated. We saw the fire as we drove west that night but had no clue it would travel over 40 miles overnight, jumping I-15 and continue racing towards the coast. We awoke to calls at 6AM for evacuations near I-5 and later that day all the way to the coast in Del Mar.
Two evacuations later
We evacuated to the west but now we had a Great Dane in need of a veterinarian who was also evacuated. After our first evacuation location was added to the evacuation list we headed south to friends who opened their home to us with the promise of blue skies, not the orange ash filled ones we were under. Additionally, they were able to get us an appointment with a vet. Unfortunately by the time the veterinarian took the bandages off, her response was “eww”. You don’t want to hear “eww” from a vet. I won’t go into details, it was definitely “eww”. The only remedy at this point was amputation with a 3 day waiting period to get an appointment.
After three days of dipping her tail in a cleaning solution, we were allowed back home and to our regular veterinarian. I had met Danes with short, 3-4 inch tails and didn’t want K’Ehleyr to lose hers. We were relieved to learn that she didn’t need to lose her entire tail, he just needed to cut off a few inches of her freakishly long tail. K’Ehleyr being K’Ehleyr, almost needed a 2nd surgery. To prevent her or Varel from chewing the bandage the vet covered it with a plastic syringe cover. Unfortunately her tail swelled more than expected and the syringe cover cut off circulation. Having her at work with me allowed me to noticed it early enough to avoid permanent damage.
In the end, she lost 3-4 inches but once it was healed no one could tell the difference. Even the little white tip she had on the end grew back.
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