Well I can weight in personally on this. My dog, Zulu has always been a vigorous tail wagger. We would come home occasionally to small or not too small blood spots on the corners of walls etc. Most of the time these weren't too bad as we don't have coffee tables or lots of things for her to hit with her tail and the wall corners in our houses are rounded or "soft" corners.
About a year after we moved into a different house, I came home early one day and the place looked like a crime scene.
No big huge pools of blood or anything too horrific but the walls and doors were covered with a blood spatter and there were fine mists and drops of blood everywhere. I was still cleaning hours later when my wife came home to find me "hunting" for tiny spots on the walls, ceiling and baseboards. This was so bad that to this day, years later, I will still occasionally find a small pin sized drop or two, I can't say if they are from that incident or what but they still surface.
After "the incident" we bandaged her tail up and began the healing process. About a week later we had to take her to the vet because her tail was "rotting". I don't know if she hit it again, I really don't think so because we were really vigilant about that or if this was from the initial injuries but her tail was severely damaged.
It had begun losing hair and was still bleeding and smelt really horrible. The vet said it looked like someone had slammed her tail in a door a couple times (her words). She ended up having to get about 1/2 her tail removed and the only explanation that we can think of is she hit it on the stair spindles which are thin and made of metal.
I don't know hot we could've avoided this short of crating her during the day. She detests the crate after a horrible Air Canada incident.
She still wags her 1/2 a tail as enthusiastically as ever and it hasn't affected her swimming which was a concern for me because she loves swimming and is a strong swimmer. I was amazed at the damage that she could self inflict with her tail wagging but maybe I shouldn't be surprised, she has been known to knock pictures off of walls with her tail.
I guess you could try teaching her to stop this but I think it would be tough to do but definitely worth it. You do NOT want to come home to a dog with a mangled tail, believe me. IF your dog only does this when you come home, you can make it sit or lie down until it calms down enough to at least stop wagging it's tail like a "mad man".
Dog way too happy.
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