My degu tail fell off

[femanel]

My degu's tail fell off. I've called the emergency vets and none of them have called me back. They act like they've never even heard of a degu. So that makes me feel less hopeful. So I'm reaching out to the degus community for help. I'm scared but wondering if it will solve itself or if I need to take him in to see the emergency vet. He acts like the tail is strange to him now that the skin is off.

[winic1]

Do you mean the skin has peeled off part of his tail? This is called "de-gloving". It happens. The important things are to make sure it isn't still bleeding, and to keep it clean. Remove the sandbath if it is in the cage. If you use wood shavings for bedding that are fine or small pieces, might be good to remove that, too, you don't want small pieces of anything being able to stick to the raw tissues.

If you think it needs cleaning, boil some water, then let it cool (to sterilize it), then gently clean the damaged part with the water. The skin should heal at the torn edge, and any exposed bone will dry up and die off, or the degu may chew this off by himself. Sounds awful, but degu tails are designed by nature to give way in case they are grabbed by a predator, to allow escape, so the process generally takes care of itself as I just described.

If it continues to bleed, or instead of looking like it is healing, it looks like it is getting more irritated, sore, hot, or he keeps picking at it and preventing healing, then it's time to go to the vet.

Most people on this board are asleep right now, so hopefully in a few hours when they wake up you'll get more advice from others with more experience than me, but I hope this helps you somewhat.

[winic1]

(bumping this back to the top of the "Recent Threads" list so it will be seen first)

[teemu]

Yeah, as Winic says, this may be really scary and shocking to experience, but degus drop their tail on purpose (well, they don't actively do it, but it's an intentional mechanism). The tail is pretty fragile, and if stuck, the skin will tear off. What probably happened was that your degu got his tail trapped somehow and pulled hard enough to tear it off. This is a fairly common situation, and normally has no lasting impact on the degu, other than the fact that the remains of the tail will drop off from where it tore, and he'll be left with a stump. He will learn to manage with less tail.

It's not pleasant to the degu, and you'll need to monitor it, clean it like advised and see that it'll sort itself out, but it's not dangerous unless there's a complication (it gets infected, there's a lot of bleeding, or it actually won't fall off after some weeks).

You should also make sure that the cage is kept clean, since he will be dragging the dying tail behind him, and you don't want him dragging it through filth. But all in all, it should sort itself out with some time. Comfort your degu in this trying time and give him a peanut to make up for the loss

Aside from the tail issue, something you should sort out is finding a vet that has experience with degus. You mentioned that all the ones you called seemed really clueless, so trying to find one who knows degus would be really important for any future accidents or health issues. Depending on where you are, there's a topic here with collected vet information about vets with degu experience. If you can't fine one near you, someone here might still have some ideas about where to find one. It's important for a degu owner to know where to go if there's a problem, since degus may need specialised care at some point in their life, and there are some fairly common issues (teeth problems, for example) that require correction from a vet to make sure they won't become serious health hazards.

[savvy]

Degloving is natural, its an escape mechanism used by degus if they are ever trapped or caught by their tails. But it can be a shock to the owner.

As already said, keep it clean, remove the sand bath and keep a check on bleeding and infection.

This is a link to our vet guide deguworld.proboards.com/thread/15521/vet-guide all the vets on this list have degu experience and have been or are currently used by members on this forum.

Keep us posted as to how he is getting on.

[winic1]

I think that femanel is in the USA, which makes it very hard to find a vet who even knows what degus are.

You'll want to look for an Exotics vet, not your run-of-the-mill dog and cat and bunny type vet. May have to travel a bit to find one, but they are out there. We found that the vets familiar with degus were all much younger, so I guess they now include them in vet school, whereas the old timers would never have heard of them.