Talk about your mundane and your pointless!
Our big yellow Lab, Daisy, really needed a bath. It’s been cold and snowy (Imagine that! In Colorado!?) since before Christmas, so Daisy has spent most of her time curled up in her doghouse. Anyone who owns a dog knows that if they spend a lot of time cooped up, they start to stink. Daisy didn’t smell any worse than any other dog, but at almost 90 pounds, there’s a lot of her to smell bad!
So Sunday afternoon, Razorette and I decided she had to have a bath. Now, unlike most Labrador retrievers, Daisy does not take easily to water. She’ll splash around in the irrigation ditches around our place in the summer to cool off, but she does not swim, and she avoids water generally.
I ran the tub full of water, put on clothes I wouldn’t mind getting all wet and smelly in, located the dog shampoo and a small bucket, and set about coaxing Daisy into the tub. No go. No amount of biscuits, cajoling, ordering or commanding would get her to even enter the bathroom. I knew I wouldn’t be able to lift her by myself, so I enlisted my wife’s help. We ended up sliding a cowering Lab into the bathroom, then lifted her by sections (front, then middle, then hind end) into the tub. She stood there, glowering at me, while I knelt down, caught my breath, and dipped the first bucketful of water and poured it over her.
That’s when the rodeo began.
I managed to block Daisy’s first two attempts to leave, all the while getting soap suds and water on almost everything in the bathroom except the dog. Eventually I got her quieted enough to get her completely wet and lathered. As I was starting to rinse her, she decided that enough was enough, head-faked me left then juked right and cleared the tub in a single bound. She shook once in the hallway, once in the living room and once in the master bedroom before rolling on the carpet to try to dry off.
We got her herded into the laundry room, but then had to figure out how to get her rinsed off. It was, after all, just above freezing outdoors. My wife realized that the faucet on the laundry room sink was adapted for a hose coupling. I fetched a length of hose from the garden shed, hooked it up and ran hot water through it to soften it, then put a sprayer on the end. We led Daisy outside (Razorette had managed to get her collar back on her and a leash, so we had some control) and rinsed her off with warm water from the tap. We held her on the porch for as long as we could, so she could shake the water off, then dragged her back inside to dry off. She wanted nothing to do with the big towels we had ready to dry her off, and using a hair dryer was out of the question. We couldn’t let her back outside because she was soaked to the skin, and it was just too cold outside.
Daisy ended up air-drying as she lay about the house all afternoon and evening. We discovered that no matter how clean a dog is, a wet dog still smells like … well, a wet dog. And as I left for work this morning, Daisy was once again curled up inside her doghouse.
I think she’ll just stay outside and smell bad until spring.
Now, I wanted a big dog that went “woof” instead of a little dog that goes “yip!”, but I’m seeing the advantages here… She has her bath once a month, just before the reapplication of the ampoule of Revolution (flea stuff).