Golden Mountain Dog Solutions

An article posted this week by CBC titled “NS veterinarians ban tail docking” announced that the NSVMA has forbidden its members from performing any surgical procedures intended solely to alter an animal’s appearance. Among the procedures affected are tail docking and ear cropping.

This is a step that is long overdue. These surgeries are predominantly driven by purely human conceptions of what an animal needs to look like; either to project a desired image, or to be in “proper” conformance with “breed standards”. This begs the question of just how surgically altering the appearance of a living organism, so that it no longer looks, or  is able to function, the way Nature intended, is in any way an improvement for the animal.

A significant amount of canine social interaction requires appropriate and timely expressions of one dog’s intentions toward another employing a subtle mix of eye contact, head position, ear posture, and tail behaviour. Unnecessarily altering a dog in any way that interferes with its ability to express itself fully by  means of these natural and instinctive methods leaves it with what, in human terms, would be called a speech impediment. Our work in dog rehabilitation likewise requires us to observe and interpret these signals, often from dogs we have never met before. A dog is a social animal and any intentional human act that undermines its natural abilities to communicate with others of its kind, or the people with whom it must interact, is quite simply, cruelty, and it remains so no matter how many coats of faux nobility and tradition are slapped on it.

We applaud this move on the part of the NSVMA and its membership, and look to the Nova Scotia government to give it further weight by legally defining unnecessary cosmetic surgery on animals as what it actually is - abuse.