I totally agree with both of you. There is absolutely no need to remove a dog's tail.
Digressing, sheep often have their tails shortened to avoid terrible blowfly strike. The tail is normally shortened by putting on a special rubber ring when the lamb is very young (3 to 5 days old). This cuts off the blood flow and the end of the tail drops off a while later as the result of necrosis. However, this is for medical reasons, to prevent the sheep from suffering from blowfly attack later. A long dirty tail (I leave it to your imagination as to why the tail gets dirty!) attracts hoards of flies in summer.
However, cutting off the tail of a dog with scissors....the mind boggles! Surely this must cause pain. Perhaps that is why docking is now illegal in many countries. In France, it is apparently still legal, but almost all vets now refuse to do docking except on medical grounds.
As for ear cropping, apparently this is illegal in the UK now (good!). I found this article on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docking_%28dog%29
There is an informative list of countries and their bans (or lack of them) at the end.
Digressing, sheep often have their tails shortened to avoid terrible blowfly strike. The tail is normally shortened by putting on a special rubber ring when the lamb is very young (3 to 5 days old). This cuts off the blood flow and the end of the tail drops off a while later as the result of necrosis. However, this is for medical reasons, to prevent the sheep from suffering from blowfly attack later. A long dirty tail (I leave it to your imagination as to why the tail gets dirty!) attracts hoards of flies in summer.
However, cutting off the tail of a dog with scissors....the mind boggles! Surely this must cause pain. Perhaps that is why docking is now illegal in many countries. In France, it is apparently still legal, but almost all vets now refuse to do docking except on medical grounds.
As for ear cropping, apparently this is illegal in the UK now (good!). I found this article on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docking_%28dog%29
There is an informative list of countries and their bans (or lack of them) at the end.
