Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)
Bathing the Dog: An Exercise in Abnormal Psychology
Why doesn't he ever roll around in flowers?By Bob Wire, 9-27-09
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Our dog is 49 years old and still cannot bathe himself. I frequently tell him to go take a bath, but he just looks at me like I’m giving the wrong answer to his constant stream of telepathic requests. (Sample: “Go to the cupboard, Bob. Open the door, Bob. Get me a sardine, Bob.”)
So of course I’m forced to do the deed myself, and I’m forced to do it often. Houdini is not one to run away, because he could never abandon this glorious castle where Milk Bones seem to grow on trees. But when he does leave the perimeter, he’s bound and determined to seek out something foul and nasty to roll in. I don’t know what the hell he’s finding out there, but it is some rank-smelling shit. Year-old dead crow? Fresh badger vomit? The grave of a zombie that’s surfaced to ground level? I have no idea, but the worse the funk, the more attractive it is to Houdini.
He comes bursting through his doggie door once in a while, after escaping the fenced yard somehow (hence the name), stinking to high heaven of something so eye-wateringly pungent that we find ourselves wishing for the blessed relief of a skunk. Times like that, it’s a four-alarm, full family emergency response. The kids tackle the dog while Barb or I run some water in the tub. Unless it actually is a skunk, Mane ‘n Tail shampoo does the trick.
But it’s more likely that he’s just accumulated random stinks on the outside and secreted them from the inside, and has reached a level where we start to smell him before he comes into the room. And he’s quicker than he looks—as soon as he hears the water splashing into the tub, he runs back into our bedroom and scoots under the bed. He actually has to get on his belly, which is two inches from the ground, and army-crawl under there. Trying to extricate him from his lair when he thinks a bath is coming is like trying to pull a turtle out of his shell. Fortunately, Houdini’s love of food short-circuits any natural defenses he’s got, so all I have to do is get down on my hands and knees next to the bed and quietly utter the magical phrase, “Go look in your dish.”
He comes out from under that bed like his tail is on fire, and practically leaves skidmarks in the hallway on his way to the kitchen. There’s always a little sump’m sump’m in his dish, of course, because I might be manipulative but I’m not mean. So, while he stands there with a dumb look on his face, chewing a bit of cheese, I nab him. If he could talk, this is when he’s say, “Oh, SHIT! The BATH! Why do I keep falling for that?” All the fight goes out of him. When I get him in the bathroom and shut the door he actually jumps into the bath voluntarily, like a death row inmate climbing onto the gurney for the ride to the execution chamber.
He’s got black hair that’s so thick and oily, it takes gallons of water to penetrate it. Especially when he’s got a sheen of deer guts or something else he likes to wear. When I finally do get him soaked, he looks just like a seal with legs. While grudgingly submitting to the humiliation and torture, he keeps looking at me sideways, as if to say, “I thought we were friends.”
As the alpha male, I can’t let too much sentimentality into the ritual here. I do talk to him the whole time I’m washing him, which is probably more for my benefit than his. “Let’s get you clean all over, buddy,” I say, gently scrubbing his undercarriage. “Hello, what do we have here? There’s nobody home! Where’s your nuts? Oh, that’s right, we had those removed. My bad!” Another dirty look, this one saying, “You’re lucky you have access to those Milk Bones, pal, or I would bite you SO HARD.”
It takes forever to rinse all the soap out of that oily seal fur, but eventually we finish, and he hops out of the tub and shakes off. Note to self: shower AFTER you’ve bathed the dog next time. Now I smell like a deer that has been washed in Mane ‘n Tail. I have about a dozen towels in there, and I rub him furiously until they’re soaked and he looks like a wet chimney brush. I always seal the doggie door before the bath, so he won’t go outside and get restinked before he’s even dry. I open the bathroom door and as soon as there is enough room for him to shoulder his way through the opening, he explodes into the hallway, running at full speed. We have wood floors, though, so it’s cartoon running in place until his feet gain purchase. I like to play a fast roll on the bongos when he does this, so it feels like a Scooby Doo scene.
He runs into every carpeted room in the house, and holds the side of his face to the floor while he frantically pushes himself around with his back legs. This has always puzzled me. I’m careful not to get water in his ears, so maybe he just doesn’t like a wet face. Maybe this is how dogs shave. I don’t know.
So once he has rubbed half the hair off his body onto various carpets, he finally runs out of steam and comes to me for his post-bath treat. “Go to the cupboard, Bob,” he thinks. “Open the door, Bob. Get me a Milk Bone, Bob.” I comply, delivering the crunchy reward. He tries to take it outside, ramming his head into the blocked-off doggie door. Damn, Houdini, it says CLOSED right there in red two-inch letters I’ve painted on the cover. Maybe he’s illiterate, but at least he smells good.
[Don’t wait until your life stinks to check NewWest.net/BobWire. By then you’ll be way behind.]
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Comments
I think I might check a book of yours out of the library if you had written one.
Like Houdini, Nancy loves to roll in the vilest things imaginable. Last weekend it was a treasure trove of dead carp lovingly left behind by asshole anglers that don’t seem to understand if you leave trash fish on the bank of a river, they die and decompose.
I managed to wrangle Nancy into a hogtied position and throw his stinking ass in the river several times (Nancy is afraid of water of course) in an effort to get some smell out of him before the ride home in the RAV. This left me shirtless and pantless for the drive home since my dog wrangling left smelling like I rolled in rancid carp as well.
So with my man tits sagging over my enormous belly, all the windows rolled down, and the Mrs. alternating between gagging and complaining, we made the 45 minute trek back to the camper where Nancy proceeded to vomit spoiled trash fish several places around camp.
On the bright side, Nancy didn’t puke in the car and I didn’t get pulled over driving down I-15 in my boxers.