*TRIGGER WARNING*: The photo in the post depicts an injured ear.
To crop or not to crop is one of the first questions a new puppy owner of breeds such as boxers, dobermanns, schnauzers, pitbulls, great danes, and many others must ponder upon.
If one were to ask about it on the internet in a pet-oriented group, they will be met with contempt and disgust for the very thought of doing such a terrible thing to their puppy. After all, animal advocates firmly instilled in general population a thought that cropping ears and docking tails is cruel as it is done for purely aesthetic reasons, and dogs are perfect as they are, in their most natural state.
If the new owner is still not convinced and intends to find a veterinarian who will perform the procedure of ear cropping, they will be met with a big disappointment. There are very few veterinarians who know how to do this properly, even fewer of those who actually will do this, and none in some provinces and states where cropping was made officially illegal.
Indeed, the world is different now from a hundred years ago, and it is really hard for a modern citizen to wrap their head around any legitimate reasoning for cutting a piece of their dog’s body off. After all, an absolute majority of dogs are purchased to be pets, who are accepted completely with all their downsides and who are loved unconditionally, regardless of how their ears or tails look.
However, like most things that seem do not make any sense in today’s context, docking and cropping made a lot of sense when it served a specific purpose: to protect the dog from getting injured while doing the job they were bred to do. And this job had nothing to do with couches, dog beds, and treats.
The dogs protected livestock from predators and sometimes fought them off. I once spoke to a person who owned herds of sheep and lived in a very remote area in Siberia. He said that he docks his Asian Shepherds’ tails and crops their ears because this is the first body part that will get torn by a wolf during a fight. Ear tips and tail tips bleed a lot and take forever to heal, so not having them at all gives his dogs a much better fighting and surviving chance.
The dogs hunted with their owners and often had to get through rough and often impenetrable terrains. Hunters still crop their working dogs’ tails today, because those long, thin ends which most hunting dogs have will definitely get caught on something and will be injured. Hence, they leave enough of a length to provide a superior mobility but dock the end of the tail to prevent accidents.
Now, the question is, do the dogs who are spending their lives on a couch really need their tails docked and ears cropped? The answer is: sometimes they do.
In the picture is the splintered ear of my dog, Orca.
She is a working-line giant schnauzer. She does Schutzhund and CKC obedience. They are not a couch, of course; yet, neither of these activities poses any danger to her tail or her ears. However, this dog has a lot of energy and does everything HARD, which includes wagging her tail and shaking her ears.
I am not even talking about routine inconveniences and hazards, such as a wagging tail that sweeps all that was on the coffee table to the floor.
The problem is that this tail is intimately familiar with all the corners inside my house. I have no clue which impact on one of those corners split the tail open, but it happened at some point, and my kitchen, ceiling, doors, and walls often look like Jackson Pollock’s artwork: symmetric blood splatter everywhere.
Ears is another story. No corners are needed to get those injured – a hard head shake will do. Both her ears and her tail do not heal, ever. They close a little and then open back up.
Would it have been better if she underwent two minor procedures when she was a puppy versus a lifetime of injuries? If you ask me, the answer is a definitive “yes.” Does it mean I advocate for universal cropping and docking? Absolutely not.
I do believe, however, that, like most things in life, this question has no black-and-white, either/or answers. Cropping and docking is a choice that needs to be made by a prospective owner of a working-breed puppy. They should not be shamed for considering this option and they absolutely should not be harassed for going forward with it, especially if their reasoning follows the best interest of their dog.