On the night before leaving for Berkeley, about two weeks ago, Zero had a truncating experience.

At one point in the late evening I let both dogs out, as we often do, but this time they had a lot of barking – more than usual – so I got them back in. A few moments later I heard a sharp yelp but could not figure out who made it. I noticed that Sparky seemed rather interested in sniffing Zero for some unapparent reason, but I thought no more of it.

When Shelley arrived home she noticed that Zero had a bit of blood on her tail, so that explained Sparky's interest, although nothing really seemed out of order. However, the next morning Shelley found a significant piece of Zero's tail in the living room. It seems the yelp originated with that coming off!

Of course Zero won a vet visit for this, where they amputated her tail a little further up from the wound. They stitched it up and left Zero in a tail bandage for the last couple weeks. She's looked ridiculous since then, with the first half of her tail all long-furred, and then an ace bandage sticking out and down for the rest.

It's worse now, though, in appearance. The bandage came off on Saturday morning (and all healed well), but now she has a big furry tail with what looks like a fuzzy pretzel rod sticking out of it. She doesn't seem to mind, and the fur will grow back eventually, but it's not the most attractive sight at the moment.

Ah, pets.



(The vet says that the whole incident could have happened weeks ago. Zero might have caught her tail in a door, or something could have bit her, or she might have had an incident at the sitter's house... no way to know. If it happened a while back, the wound might have caused the tail to take a while to die off on its own, with Zero yanking it off finally on that Friday night. Or it could have been that very same night with an encounter in our yard, or her catching her tail in the outdoor furniture and yanking, or whatever.)