The Unhappy Tail of Happy's Tail
(Now with a happy ending!)

Happy with her cropped tail

  Happy Haiku Here
Lovely, lean, licker of fur
Smart, sleepy feline

Happy is a special kitty.  After "growing up" on the streets of Rhome, she came into a home with three other kitties.  Even after 9 months, she was still in the process of learning to trust the other kitties and live peacefully with them.  Normally, such adaptation problems would be trouble enough.  But Happy also developed some "tail issues".  

It started in fall of 2003.  She was chasing her tail and pulling out the hair on the tip of it.  Once she had totally denuded the tail tip of hair, she began biting it, quickly biting her tail down to the bone.  After many vet trips, medication and constantly keeping her tail tip wrapped up, Happy would not stop chasing (and catching!) her tail.  After another gnawing session, the vet said that the tip of the tail was dead and needed to be amputated.

After the first surgery

The vet removed about four inches of Happy's tail and we kept our fingers crossed that this would be the solution.  But even  right after surgery, Happy continued to chase and bite her tail.  Even in the blue Cone of Shame, Happy kept constantly bothering her tail.  Still being gnawed on, her tail was not able to heal.  

In early March, Dan and I decided that amputating four inches of Happy's tail obviously did not solve the problem - the entire tail needed to be removed.  March 4, Happy went into the vet's office with a six inch tail.  March 5, Happy came out of the vet's office with a one inch nub. 

A groggy Happy-cat in the blue Cone of Shame the day after her tail amputation

No tail is chic look
Cone of shame - GO AWAY SOON
 Feline beauty girl

The tail nub

Once her hair started growing back, the cone was removed.  Happy has been tail-less for since the spring of 2004 and she has not exhibited the same tail-chasing behavior that got her into trouble before.  After some extensive research on the internet and chats with the vet, everyone's best theory is that Happy suffers from feline hyperesthesia, which is defined as "unusual sensitivity to sensory stimulus" - in other words, she's freak out when she'd see her tail, not realizing it was her tail and attack it over and over again because of her heightened sensitivity and "freakiness" (that's a medical term, that one).  Happy is lucky in that her hyperesthesia is relatively mild.  Some kitties have seizures in addition to the tail biting.  

Without being able to see her tail nub to get over-stimulated by its taunting behavior, Happy has been happy with her nubbed tail and we hope she continues to be!  It looks like Happy's Tail Saga is over.  And they all lived Happily ever after!

Haikus by KelJohnson