# puppy almost 4 months docked tail bleeding abit



## The Leo (Oct 19, 2020)

My puppy is almost 4 months, sometimes he does bite his tail tip but today after walk the tip wound is broken and bled abit.
I cleaned it up it seems fine now, should I be worry and take him to the vet?


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## texasred (Jan 29, 2012)

It does not look too bad right now, but tails can turn bad very quickly. You need to keep him from chewing it, until fully healed. Really for something like this, I still put a donut collar on them at night, for a week or two after its healed. As your trying to break the habit of them chewing, and re-injuring the tail. 
If it gets any worse, I would want to add a oral antibiotic.

We had a GSP in rescue. He had to have surgery on his tail 3 different times, before we finally we're able to get it to heal. Tails can turn necrotic faster than other places on a dog.


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## einspänner (Sep 8, 2012)

I went through this with Scout a couple years ago and thought I could treat at home, but the tip did go necrotic and she is now a vertebrae shorter. Still feel awful about that. 

The vet shaved the hair on her tail and then secured a syringe with the tip cut off to her tail with some cloth tape. That allowed air to get around the wound and protected it from more trauma. It did however make it even more painful when she hit us with it.  I was also instructed to clean it with chlorhexidine gluconate twice a day and she was given pain meds and antibiotics. It took maybe 6 weeks to heal on that protocol. Obviously her wound was worse, but the syringe thing could be useful for you as well if you can keep him from chewing it. You may not need to got in to the vet, but I'd loop them in now so they can give you markers to look for to make sure it's healing correctly.


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