The tail is exactly what domestic sheep are born with. It's docked when the lambs are young to prevent it from turning into a club of feces and wool.
Once upon a time, many moons ago when I attended an agricultural and technical college as an animal science major, we had an actual little farm there, complete with sheep, several breeds of cattle and what seemed like a billion chickens. Newborn lambs were docked using (at the time probably modern) something akin to an electrified garden shear, and also one that used a rubber band type, cutting off the blood supply.
Actually, there are quite a difference between different breeds of sheep regarding their tail length! Where I'm from we have mostly short tailed sheep, different kinds of north european short tail sheep, while the longer tailed sheeps haling from Britain(?) are more common in our neighboring countries. Ours are older breeds I think maybe?
We don't dock their tails here, the breeds we have most of are natural shorter. Google tells me that 7-15cm tail length is normal for our kind, but that they can be way longer on other breeds 🤷♀️
I remember when we had a friend visiting from another countrie and they actually told us that they though our sheep looked funny with their short tails 😂
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u/Woland77 Jun 03 '26
What did the vet say about the tail?