Warning: The following post is not for the weak of heart or stomach.Max and his best friend, Rufus, stay together in a large cage when the family isn't home. This was fine until last Thursday when I arrived home late from work. The family wasn't there , so I let our three dogs out of the house, to the usual happy commotion.
Coming back inside, I was shocked to see heavy blood spotting across the kitchen floor. I followed the red trail to the cage, and found a scene of crimson gore: blood soaking the cage floor, spattering the wall behind it, drenching the window curtains, spotting furniture, and pooling on the carpet around the cage.
Quickly checking, I found Rufus' tail and hindquarters were drenched with fresh blood. And with every step, more dripped from the end of his tail.
The next hour was a confused blur as a neighbor and I used direct pressure, chemical cauterization and wrapping to stop the bleeding. Rufus was in shock from blood loss and pain, but we wrapped him in a blanket and he soon recovered.
The house looked like a butcher's shop, with blood spotting, streaking, smearing and soaking surfaces from the back door to the bathtub (where we contained the worst). Five days later, we're still sponging blood out of the carpet, and I'll have to repaint sections of the walls.
So what happened? Our vet later found that the tip of Rusus' tail, about an inch, had been neatly severed. You can see his tail bone in the wound, yuck!
I have two theories:1. Rufus somehow wedged his tail into the wire of the cage and yanked off the tip while getting loose.
2. Max and Rufus fought in the cage, and Max bit off Rufus' tail.
Either idea is plausible, especially since the cage was half-wrecked, as though someone had thrashed around in it. However, there was no hair caught on the cage, no blood on Max's muzzle, and we never found the tail tip.
Rufus will be fine, though he will have a little less wag from now on. And I have my suspicions about what happened. Since the "accident," Max has looked particularly innocent, a clear sign he's guilty of something.
