Dog Washing

We got 9 new dogs at the kennel today. I was on stand-by as a hauler just in case there were more dogs or someone had something come up last minute. I still wanted to be a part of this day in some capacity, so I decided to go and help wash to hounds. As many times as I have helped haul the dogs, I never participated in the washing. I have observed and heard the stories about the tick pulling and the de-fleaing, but never actually had my hands in doing this.

Heather Simon and I partnered up and we grabbed out first victim, errr... uh... spa goer... White and black boy, his name escapes me at the moment. Anyways, we lifted him up into the tub got him situated and ready for the scrub down. This big boy was so easy to wash, we did 2 sessions with the flea and tick shampoo and then did a wash with the shampoo for white coats. I cleaned his ears out, he was in good shape... until... I found the family of ticks living in between his toes. Through the whole wash, we picked them off as we came to them, nothing too crazy... his toes were another story... I think I pulled about 20 ticks of this guy and gave up. We had him in that tub for about 20 -30 minutes and there was no way I could get all of them with him standing. Lifted him out of the tub and passed him over to Ginny. To get him in a position to where we could get all of his hitch hikers off of him, I lifted him off of the ground and placed him in Ginny's lap. He wasn't too sure about this until he had 4 of us all around him, some of us searched while other put ointment on his hot spots. He decided that this was the treatment for him and started to close his eyes while Ginny continued to hold him in her lap, he loved every monute of it. Probably the sweetest thing I have ever seen, I think Eda got some good pitures of this, so keep a look out... Oh, and this boy id definitely not small dog tolerant, there was a Jack Russel mix that he was way to interested in...

We then washed a sweet little brindle girl who slipped in the tub, she wound up on her side and decided that this was the position she would stay in for the remainder of her treatment. She seemed to be very tolerant of everything, not too many ticks and fleas on this girl.

In all, it was an interesting experience for me, very different from the Birmingham thing we did this summer. I did come home and look at all Blue's feet to see if there were any ticks hiding anywhere, not that I expected to find any, but honestly, I think we pulled over 100 ticks off these 9 dogs. They are happy and rested and ready to be loved on by anyone and everyone!