The Great Tail Amputation Incident, originally uploaded by pmarkham.

Due to a freak accident with a screen door slamming on her tail, Belle lost about six inches of her tail. It happened in a flash, and Belle, always the stoic one, yelped once and never made another sound about it. The result of the accident was she lost the fur, skin, and muscle off the last six inches of her tail — a term doctors call de-gloving. There wasn’t anything they could do to reattach the missing tissue, so they just cut off the exposed bone and sewed up what was left. The result was the curly tail Belle had as a young dog was decidedly less curly in her older years.

Belle didn’t even miss a beat. This photo was taken just a few days after the incident (note the bandage) at fundraising walk for a local charity. She walked several miles with us that day.

Belle was our Labrador/Sheltie mix. My wife adopted her from the Animal Humane Society in 1993 when she was just nine weeks old. She lived 16 years and seven months — an amazingly long time for a dog her size. She died on October 24, 2009, surrounded by her family and our other animals.