Like all of us, they need to be bathed on occasion. We have found across the past two years, as Trinity and Emmett have discovered the joys of skunk-hunting, some of them need to be bathed more than others. And even with our magic skunk-scent-neutralizing potion, the bath-to-skunk-encounter ratio is at a minimum a 3:1 ordeal, and even at that, you will still get whiffs of skunk for months to come, especially around the eyebrow region.
Hair brushing is a nice thing to do, especially around the turn of each season. It only takes about five minutes with them to be disabused of the misconception that they do not shed, and giving them a nice brushing seems to land a somewhat preemptive blow that I assure myself saves at least two house-wide sweepings a day. The way I see it, I can stand and pick the hair off the brush, or I can chase it around with a broom and crouch down with a dustpan later.
Nail-clipping is a major ordeal, with that not being their most favorite thing , nor, truth be told, mine. I can usually get one foot done on one dog before the rest are alerted to the activity, and run off to apply grease to themselves so wrestling them to the ground to submit to my caretaking can be that much more difficult. Four out of six of them have black toenails, which means I either exercise great caution in taking just little bits off the ends with a need for frequent re-trimming, or risk quicking one of them and then running around, mopping up blood spots, apologizing profusely and abandoning whatever remaining nails need to be trimmed on that dog to be attempted another day.
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Now ear-cleaning is an entirely different matter. The dogs take responsibility for policing and augering out one another’s ears on a routine basis. Sometimes we will stumble upon the highly sonorous and slobbery event of a group ear cleaning And sometimes, they offer their grooming services to us, free of charge, whether we want or need it, or not.
