This, unfortunately, is a picture from life. When Dixie was small, her tail was so vast that she looked like a little lemur. Eventually she grew into it.
But in May of 2004, when she was four years old, she met with a nameless misfortune and came home with her tail drooping behind her. She wasn’t upset or in pain or sick in any way; her tail just wouldn’t go up. The vet’s x-rays showed that the tail had been cleanly dislocated. From above, everything looked perfectly normal. From the side, one vertebra was directly above the other.
This kind of thing can’t be repaired—at least not without serious orthopedics at a major hospital—so the only alternative was to amputate her tail before it started losing circulation. Early photographs of the stump show it looking just like a turkey neck. But it healed nicely and the fur grew back. And there is just enough tail remaining that you can see it bobbing up and down to match Dixie’s mood.