Yeah, my dog gets pretty smelly after a while. Like any dog, she enjoys rolling in poop and such, and I would like to wash her more often than twice a year. However, she’s big (70+ lbs.) and quite hairy, which would be very messy to wash in the tub, and I know she’d shake herself all over the bathroom. I might take her to be groomed soon, since she’s quite odiferous now and my couch is getting gross.
Yes, your Sascha has a similar face to my dog, but my Sasha has floppy ears and long hair. Her tail is really fluffy. How big is your dog?
Thanks for saying she’s pretty. Her face is so soulful and cute, I can hardly stand it. She’s a mutt, I gather. She was a shelter rescue, so I have no info except her appearance. She definitely has shepard, with the coloring, but she has the fur of a collie type. Her temperament is quite docile and shy, and I can let her go outside without supervision and she always comes back faithfully when she’s done. The best dog I could ever ask for!
I feed my dogs a quality dog food (no ethoxyquin or BHA, I am assured.) My mom works at a pet/livestock store and avidly reads information about potentially dangerous additives and nags the guy who owns the company not to carry products that contain them. (And he listens to her!) She had him quit carrying Diamond products long before the recall. So, I trust her when she tells me the product I feed them is a good one.
I know some dogs are stinky because their owners feed them bad food, but don’t all dogs naturally have a dog smell if they go unwashed for a long period of time? It seems to me that bacteria would love the oils on a dog’s skin as much as they would a human’s, and isn’t bacteria what causes odor?
And what about you folks who don’t wash your dogs and don’t feed a raw diet?
Probably more due to the high grain content of kibble, if that’s all the dog eats…kibble is mostly grains & carbs. Some dogs don’t do well on them, particularly corn.
Even many crappy kibbles nowadays - Beneful, Iams, etc - don’t have BHT/BHA/ethoxyquin any more.
The odd thing is, Sasha’s head smells great, kind of like lilacs, no matter how gross the rest of her smells. I really think she smells because of what she gets into outside. She tried to bring a random poop in the house the other day, rolls in the piles of deer scat when she finds it, and she sought out a several days old road kill last summer to frolic in. If she lived in a 100% poop and dead thing free environment, she’d smell great all the time.
As a matter of fact, I’ve heard that their skin and hair exude some sort of oils and that bathing too much is not good for them. You’re washing the oils away, and it can dry them out, and possibly lead to more stinkage.
But, who knows. I tried to google for some info, and most of it seems to be from people who can profit from dog baths.
But, I don’t have smelly dogs. My folks have always had bassett hounds. That’s a stinky dog. The thing is. . .bathing basically makes the dog smell like soap for about 3 hours, and then it just goes right back to smelling the way it did before the bath. All you’re doing is washing away his natural state. He doesn’t stink because of things he rolled in (unless you’re actually bathing your dog to directly rid him of something he rolled in).
Still, if you find bathing your dog a pain, I’d suggest trying to skip it. I bet your dog will reach his natural “stink point” and then stay there. I, seriously, have not bathed my dogs in 7 years. They haven’t gotten any stinkier than they were 6 years and 364 days ago.
only in the summer. My dogs are outside dogs, my parents don’t like having dogs in the house, and the only time they get a bath is when I come home from university. It would be impossible to bathe the dogs when you are over 2000 miles away.
I’ve got a black lab mix, and she gets a bath whenever she gets stinky, which is usually from the Poop and Dead Things Frolics that she likes to take, just like Sasha.
Someone around here (I forget who, darn) turned me on to Missing Link, which is a powdered additive that you can stir into your dog’s food at mealtimes. It has essential fatty acids and proteins along with other goodies. When I first got Daytona, her skin was VERY flaky and itchy, to the point where she couldn’t tolerate being brushed. That stuff, plus oatmeal shampoo and general good living, have made her coat glossy and her skin non-flaky. Great stuff.
Maybe that’s dependant on breed. Mine smell good after a bath for at least three weeks, then they start to get that doggy smell (you only notice it if you’re hugging them, though.) It slowly intensifies-- not to where you’d smell it if they walked into a room, but to where I can smell it if they jump up on the bed with me.
It’s been about two weeks since their last bath, so in the interests of science, I just called Polaris, my long-haired mutt over for a sniff. I stuck my face in the hair at the neck and inhaled. I smell dust and a very faint doggy smell. I also smell Now and Later candies so she must have gotten into the trash again.
What is it about dogs that makes them abhor being clean? i can bathe my Aussie Sherpherd (Daisy), towel her off, and give her a spritz of perfume. She then bolts for the door, and usually returns, smelling like she’s rolled insomething long dead!
All joking aside, the smell of rotting flesh may be appealing to dogs because it advertises to others that they have a food source. Perhaps lady dogs see a male who smells like a dead squirrel and think he’ll be a good provider for her pups because of it. This is a guy who has groceries.
They roll in poop because it covers their scent temporarily and makes hunting easier. In the wild, wolves roll in herbivore poop right before they start tracking them as prey. The buffalo (or whatever) just smells the scent of buffalo dung, and not the wolf lurking in the tall grass/
