Bobtails
in the Pembroke Welsh Corgi When the first standard was written, it was only natural that it said “tail short, preferably natural” as a greater percentage of all pems at the time were born with natural short tails. Just look at the photos of the first greats, tail length varied from terrier tails to normal, short bobs, like you can see in Ch Rozavel Red Dragon, whose tail is very much the undocked bobs we normally see here today. In her book, “The Welsh Corgi” Thelma Gray writes, “Many Pembrokes are born tailless or with a very short stump, though half, three-quarter and full length tails are usual.” (Third Edition, page 41)
Typical bobtail: Ch Rozavel Red Dragon whelped 1932 Where did this trait get lost, then? An old English breeder I spoke to about this, told me that when she got a bobtail in a litter, she stopped breeding from that bitch, as the bobs were so difficult to dock, and she found the docked behind so much neater. The same applied to all her friends in corgis. And we all know how easy it is to lose a dominant gene. This maens that mostly the gene “survived” where appearance was not the main thing – that is where the pem was kept as a working dog or merely a pet – although the occasional bob slipped through the breeding program in the bigger kennels as well. Stormerbanks used to get some, and in later years Peggy Gamble of the Blands Pembroke took a great interest in them and made sure the gene was preserved. When the docking ban was enforced in Scandinavia in the late 80’s, the corgi clubs in the Nordic countries all had a different approach to the problem. In Norway, we
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DOG WORLD April 2021
opted for the natural short tail that is preferred in the standard. As we do not have the big kennels with large breeding stock, it was important that all breeders in the club pulled together and used our resources to the best of the breed. We turned to Peggy Gamble for help and several stud dogs and brood bitches with natural bobs were imported. These dogs were not of the quality our dogs then had, but we knew we had to sacrifice some generations in order to get what we wanted – the saucy little behind we were used to. We realised that by breeding only from those few imports, our gene pool would be drastically depleted, so the long tails were looked upon as a gene bank for future generations, while the bob were bred to our best dogs and bitches, later on breeding the resulting bobs to dogs with full tails again, but still getting over 50% of the pups with short tails. Nothing much was known about the gene at the time we started. It was assumed it was a dominant gene with incomplete penetrance, and we also assumed that the Welsh farmers of old would certainly not have opted for a dog with a natural bobtail unless this meant it was sound and functional, which was the main thing for a working farm dog. But rumours were aplenty; the bobtail lead to the lacking angulation in knee and hock, the bobtail caused kinky tails, the bobtail was related to defects in the spinal vertebrae, the bobtail lead to puppies being born without anus, but worst of all; the bobtail gene was lethal, causing litter sizes to go down,
Four present day bobtails: (Top left) A mature bitch, (Bottom left) 8 weeks pup, (Top right) 9 months male, (Bottom right) a mature male.
