Quote Originally Posted by jwolfe152 View Post
wow i know you said it was a small area but how did you amputate it without exposing bone or hurting her more?
She had already done most of the work for me, if I'd left her another few minutes I think she would have ripped the end off on the her own. All I had to do was cut through the bone and ligaments that were still holding the end on, I used a pair of dissection scissors because a scalpel would have needed me to pin her down.
I suspect it hurt a little, but not enough to stop her chewing down the piece of salmon I gave her to keep her still while I did it. I'm pretty sure she didn't miss a chew.
It obviously did expose bone and a cross section of the inside of her tail, but at that point in her body the diameter of her tail is less than 1mm. It really is a tiny injury and without looking closely you wouldn't notice the tail isn't complete.

At the end of the day she had a section of tail which almost certainly had no feeling in it because the spinal cord was damaged, and definitely had no blood supply. I could have left it to fall off on its own, but leaving it added the risk that necrosis could spread infection into the wound. Removing the dead tissue was the sensible thing to do.