IF I was clearly not the respectable lady that I am, outwardly at least, you could easily mistake me for a habitable drug user from the many needle marks on my arms. These are not from syringes, though. These are inflicted by the lethally sharp baby teeth of our nine-week-old spaniel puppy Misty.

Warning notices are issued to visitors not to wear flappy skirts or trousers unless they fancy a ripped, jagged or torn look to their garments. Initially she did adopt a fairly demure and hesitant demeanour around us and the other dogs. For about a day. Then once she had sussed out the vulnerability of her prey and how susceptible we and visitors were to our charms, that disappeared.

So far, Misty’s fearless approach to dogs and humans has not stretched to sheep or hens. She will not accompany me anywhere near the hen houses. If any poultry is around or ewes and their lambs approach the fence, she scuttles back into the house with her stumpy little tail between her legs. Referencing her tail, our vet checked her paperwork to confirm that, as a working dog, the docking had been completed legally by a veterinary surgeon. Traditionally tails are docked so that dogs working their way through undergrowth on shoots do not collect burrs and foxtails that might cause pain and infection, or injure their tails in dense thickets.

Misty’s tail was docked well before we saw her, and I’m pleased that it is not too short. There is plenty of length left for her tail to communicate social clues as to whether she is happy or cautious or even, and we have had no indication of this, aggressive.

Millie our terrier has not, unlike our previous Jack Russell Bud, had her tail docked. His had been cut off very close to his rump and had virtually no wag left in it at all. Millie proudly sports quite a plume of a tail and this has proved a very useful handle to pull her out of holes with if she has dug down deep into the earth in pursuit of a rat or rabbit. In fact, you could easily twist an ankle in the house paddock if you did not look where you were going thanks to Millie’s excavations.

Fizz, our border collie, possesses a real plume of a tail, a wonderful rudder and counter balance for all those quick turns she needs to make when rounding up the sheep. And as I have run out of our canine pets now, I think I had better end this shaggy dog tale about dogs tails before I tail off on tales about tails.