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Frankly it's common sense that a breed that is supposed to be naturally born with a tail, but has no tail at birth is a genetic malformity...
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Erm...breeds are all the same species - the default state is having a tail, so it's always a malformation of the spinal column to be born tailless. I don't disagree that it's a malformation (it is), what I disagree with is that a congenital bobtail necessarily carries a higher risk of associated problems - the evidence I've seen thus far doesn't seem to back this up. Again, I'm not agreeing with this woman breeding for taillessness by any means, I'm just pointing out that it doesn't seem to be accurate (going by the evidence at hand anyway, which is pretty sparse) to say that naturally bob-tailed dogs (most of which have at least one or two tail vertebrae) have any greater incidence of problems than any other dogs. I don't think we really understand the genetics, but it seems likely that most naturally bobtailed breeds' genes code for the tail to stop growing below the point at which it could cause problems, and that most puppies whose spinal columns stopped growing above this point are reabsorbed as embryos.
What Mary says makes sense, that it depends on how tailless the dog is. If the spinal column stops forming below the level at which the nerves requried for continence and the like are located, then there's no reason a dog born tailless will have any problems whatsoever, which is really the only point I'm trying to make here.