A commercial, of sorts

Okay, so you may have seen those ads for the FURminator, a shedding tool that is touted to work better than rakes, combs or grooming brushes. They are hideously expensive but guaranteed to perform.

After we bathe the dogs, there is always a two to three day period of massive shedding, which is probably stress as much as anything...the bath is a traumatizing experience for them, even when it goes well. You can just say "you want a bath?" to our dogs and the ears will go down and the dogs will slink away; one will even go upstairs and hide under the bed if you ask her. So we try not to use the "b" word around them.

At any rate, back to the shedding: it's a mess that begins in the shower when they are being bathed. They lose a ton of fur in there. Then they get dried off and leave a ton of fur on the floor, in the towel, and on the carpet. It's always a big mess.

So I bought a FURminator a few months ago. I tried it on the dogs just to see how it would do (I didn't do it after a bath, I just did it to try it). It worked pretty well; well enough that I didn't feel the urge to return it, at least.

Fast forward to this past Saturday, when Bernice had a bath. She shed a lot more than she usually does during the bath, which was impressive in and of itself. And Saturday night and Sunday morning, she was a walking explosion of fur. You could see it just hanging off her. So on Sunday, I took her outside with the FURminator and got to work. Thirty minutes later, the results were shocking.

The commercials weren't exaggerating. Jess and I took pictures, but it's hard to tell from the pictures just how much undercoat this thing took out. It was quite impressive. We could have made a coat for a medium-sized dog out of the fur that came off her! Meanwhile, the cats seemed to be amused by the process and came out to watch, which is unusual, because they usually hide under the house when the dogs are out.



Beginning the process. Note that the dog is thoroughly focused on the cats, who are just out of the picture.



More...



The finished furpile...



And as seen from a different angle. No angle was really good enough to dramatize this.