Wash the dog!

My dog has her own pool to keep her cool in the summertime. This is nice, but it does present some problems, namely the fact that she gets wet and ends up smelling like... a wet dog. We have determined that this smell had gotten worse in recent weeks, owing mostly to the fact that while the pool does have water, it lacks the soap necessary to clean the dog.

So we decided to give her a bath yesterday. Not a big deal, right? Well, that depends somewhat on the size and excitability of said dog. Ours happens to be approximately 97 pounds (mostly muscle) and prone to barking at and/or chasing anything that moves. Yup, this'll be lots of fun.

We started out by getting out the tub (a plastic box, about 36" square, with a drainage plug in the bottom) and rigging up two hoses: one with hot water and one with cold water. This, of course, involved much running back and forth between the three water spigots in our house to get the hoses and attach them in the proper places. We filled the tub and managed to coax Sylver (that's the dog) into the nice, warm water. She wasn't particularly happy with the situation, but with Dad holding on to her, there wasn't much she could do about it.

The first part of her bath went just fine, and she held still while we used ice cream buckets to pour water down her back to get her wet enough to be shampooed, and she was pretty good while we got her all sudsy with green apple-scented dog soap. However, by the time we needed to start rinsing her off, she thought that she'd had just about enough of this bath stuff. She tried several interesting maneuvers to escape, at least one of which ended up with me getting most of an ice cream bucket of warm water poured down my leg instead of on the dog. In the middle of this somewhere, my mother's sister Kay arrived with her husband, which caused the dog to go nuts, barking and trying to run up and greet them. By the end, I was standing in front of her with her head under my arm to prevent escape while my sister and my dad finished rinsing her. We then led her over to the picnic table and got her to sit on top while we dried her off.

So we ended up with three very wet humans and one nice clean dog.


At least she smells better.