Doberman Puppies Blog

How to tape your Doberman’s ear?

After cropping your Doberman puppy’s ears, it is going to require regular ear tapings for quite some time. Proper taping will ensure the puppy less stress and beautiful ears. It takes patience and persistence for success.

1. Post the ears and leave them up six days, then take down and leave down for a few hours but never overnight. 
2. Re-tape and leave them up again for six days, then remove tape again. 
3. When the ears stand, you can leave them down until they start to drop, then re-tape as before and leave them for another six days. 
4. Search and smell the ears regularly for scent of infection. NEVER post infected ears. Also, remember always to clean the ears from glue after removing the tape.

Ears should not be taped until most of the scabs from the surgery have healed.  If there are just 1 or 2 scabs left, cover those with a little antibiotic powder, cover this with gaze and then tape over them.

There is no set amount of time that it takes before a puppy’s ears will stand; the average time for taping is approximately 4-5 months. Most pups have their ears up by the age of 9 months. That said, it isn’t unusual for some ears not to stand until the pup is a year old or more.  Some puppies have very thick ear leather, which means that their ears will take longer to raise. Also a long show crop that you can see in some of our champions takes it a few months extra to raise but it is well worth it!

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Although we usually see Dobermans with a short tail, they are actually born with a tail that is longer than that of many breeds. The short tail is a result of a procedure called: ” Docking”. In this proceedure, the majority of the tail is surgically removed within days of the dog’s birth. These days, docking is illegal in a number of countries. Exceptions are: North America, France, Russia, Japan and some other countries where there is a large population of Dobermans. Docking is normally done soon after the dog’s birth. This means that the breeder nearly always makes the decision before the dogs are even put on the market. Some believe that docking a Doberman’s tail creates a sleek look that the dog is supposed to have. By “supposed to have”, I mean how Louis Dobermann originally envisioned the dog to look. Nature had other ideas it seems, but that does not stop people from docking a Dobie’s tail.

A Dobie with a long tail…as nature intended…

A Dobie with a docked tail….as humans intended…