About the dewclaws: right or wrong ?

 

The removal of dewclaws from a less than a week old  puppy is not painful.

WRONG

The feeling of pain is as intense for a puppy as for an adult but the puppy can only cry to express its suffering.

When cutting the dewclaws, it is necessary for to have an assitant to help him to firmly hold the back paws that the puppy is trying to move in all directions to escape from the pain of the scalpel.

The puppy continuously screams sharply and stridently during the whole operation and an attentive breeder will notice the puppy still moaning sometimes several hours after the operation.

With the Bernese mountain dog, the dewclaws are particularly developed. Most of the puppies are born (like a lot of other mountain dogs for whom the presence of dewclaws is sometimes compulsary, like the Pyrenean mountain dog) with one or two dewclaws strongly attached to the metatarsals. Often, it is a real toe and the operator sometimes has to carefully count the number of toes to locate the ones he needs to amputate

It is mostly dewclaws or rather toes hinged on a metatarsal bone smaller but distinctive. The operator has to dislocate the dewclaw by introducing a scalpel or sometimes scissors into the knuckle between the metatarsal and the first phalanx of the dewclaw.

The removal of the dewclaw is done during the first week of the puppy’s life. At this age, the anaesthesia is delicate for a small animal that is not yet able to perform its homoeothermic function on its own. The dosage, the toxicity and the pharmacokinetic of the analgesic products used in veterinary medicine are not well known for the new born. That’s why the removal of the dewclaws  is practised with neither anaesthesia nor analgesia.

 

The surgical removal of dewclaws  is useful: when they are left on the paw, they can break and hurt the dog; also the dogs which are left with their dewclaws become knock-kneed.

Wrong

The surgical removal of dewclaws is a custom instituted by the dog experts when the breeds standards were instituted in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, depending on the breeds.

When we look carefully at the old pictures of Swiss mountain dogs or at the photos of the first bernese mountain dogs taken by Albert Heim, we quite often notice the presence of the dewclaws on the back paws.

 

In the aim of standardization, the dog experts have decided that the presence of dewclaws was undesirable for the Bernese mountain dog, the Leonberger or the Sarplaninca dogs, whereas for other breeds, the presence of dewclaws is mandatory like for the Pyrenean mountain dog or the Beauce shepherd. During decades, while some were cutting thousands of toes of little Bernese mountain dogs, some breeders were euthanizing hundreds of newly born Beauce shepherd puppies because they had only one of the two dewclaws required…

The dewclaws have no specific use, but they are not cumbersome either. The wounds at the claw level (fracture, pulling out at the root of the claw, slit along the claw,…), which can sometimes worsen into whitlows, are much more frequent on the claws of the other toes in contact with the ground and thus more exposed to various  traumatisms, than on the dewclaws’ claws.

We must simply think about checking the length of the dewclaw’s claw  twice a year and cut it if it has grown too much, so it does not hurt the little dewclaw’s pad if it becomes too long

Some have said that the presence of dewclaws would infer bad plumbs to the back paws, pointing out the Beauce shepherd whose back paws are most often opened.

It is wrong, the build of the dog is not dependent on the presence or not of dewclaws but on the selection. For some breeds like the Leonberger which breeders  also generally cut dewclaws, there is still  important selection work to carry out to improve the back paws’ balance. They are often knock-kneed but this has nothing to do with presence or not of dewclaws. We should also note that the environment has a strong influence on the plumbs. A mountain dog raised on a tiled floor in an apartment will generally have bad plumbs but this is another topic…

For several years, I have refused to proceed with the surgical removal of dewclaws , as well as the amputation of the tail, ears, vocal cords, or phalanxes of the cats.

If in the Bernese mountain dog breed it begins to be admitted that the presence of dewclaws is not undesirable and that we must leave them on if they are present, the breeders who dislike them can gradually select out declaws. I am unfortunately still often facing delicate situations with other breeds, where the breeder can not sell puppies with dewclaws because the breeds’ judges do not want to confirm them.

It is therefore necessary to make all the people involved in the world of dogs (breeds clubs, veterinary surgeons, breeders…) recognize that the cutting of dewclaws  is an illegal practice from another age…

 

 

 

                                                                                                                        Sebastian MIRKOVIC

                                                                                                                         Veterinary surgeon.