Valerie Schultz: It's doom and groom time for household pets
| Thursday, May 21 2009 04:14 PM
Last Updated Thursday, May 21 2009 04:14 PM
Ah, late spring ... the glorious weather warms our faces and our souls. The tulips and lilacs have come and gone. The lawn is green, the air is delicately scented, and daylight lingers longer and longer. It would be a perfect time, if not for that dreaded springtime ritual, the shedding of the pets.
Our many pets have lived out long, happy lives over the years. We have adopted a cavalcade of cats, dogs, fish, rabbits, mice and rats, but our average is roughly two dogs and two cats. Some of our pets have been copious shedders, seeming to lose the equivalent of a twin with each onset of warmer weather. One especially furry dog led us to buy a Shop-Vac, because the regular vacuum choked on her abandoned clumps of hair during shedding season. We could have stuffed entire pillows with her leavings, if only they had smelled sweeter.
Compared to some animal lovers, we are lame pet owners. My youngest sister, for example, is the head vet tech at an emergency animal hospital. She is supremely capable and devoted. Her beloved pit bull has had the kind of heart surgery that is so rare and complicated that it interested our dad's cardiologist. Our animals, in contrast, rarely even go to the vet. Our pets do not get birthday presents. They do not have their own beds. We love them, but we do not think of them as four-legged, non-talkative people.
We are at our worst when it comes to grooming. The pets are largely on their own. Most cats are good at this. Dogs, however, are not so fussy about their personal hygiene. Since our current dogs detest water -- they tiptoe around puddles and sprinklers, unlike other splash lovers we have known -- we congratulate ourselves if we bathe them more than twice a year. Also, we are lazy. The only exceptions to our uninspired grooming are the springtime shedders, who usually end up with a trip to the vet's groomer, to rectify the horror of their overgrowth.
By way of introduction, our current dogs are Ringo and Pomme. Ringo (full name: Ringo Starr) is a Hollywood native. Our daughter gave a couple of homeless guys $20 in exchange for their timid little dog, and then couldn't keep him at her apartment. So of course Ringo came home to live with the folks. We had to teach him not to raid the garbage for food. But he is smart and a good watchdog, and more importantly, short-haired. Pomme, whose name means "apple" in French, and who was named well before Gwyneth Paltrow made it fashionable to name your loved ones after fruits, came from a box in front of Save Mart by way of a friend at church whose husband was against the whole idea of a puppy. Our youngest daughter begged us to take her in, which of course we did, because we too are seduced by the cuteness of puppies. Pomme is well-behaved, and also a minimal shedder, which makes me like her more.
Our current cats are Milo and Mowgli. Milo is an aging, orange sociopath who has always gone out of her way to bite the friends of our children. To her credit, however, Milo is short-haired. Mowgli came from a mysterious litter in a barn on the property of a dicey woman who had put an ad in the paper. Picking him out was like visiting the set of an episode of "The Twilight Zone." But he is a sweet, loving cat who comes to the door when we arrive home and gives us goodnight kisses: seemingly more canine than feline in his behavior.
Mowgli's tragic flaw, however, is his hairiness. He is a black cat with Scottish fold blood, so his tiny ears bend over adorably, but he must also have some kind of Sasquatch ancestor, because his fur has a life of its own. It grows exponentially. My husband decided this past winter to brush Mowgli regularly in the hope of saving the cost of the annual spring grooming, but it's been no use. Although he loves to be brushed, and indeed demands it, he still reached a critical mass of a matted, poopy mess who needed to be shaved professionally (the cat, not my husband). Thus it was that, several hours and $100 later, a sedated cat returned home, smelling medicinally of the vet and looking like an alien.
Somehow, there's always one shedder in the lot. It used to be our fat yellow Labrador, who resembled a walrus after his grooming. Now it is the black cat who, with his fashionable "lion cut," looks like what my husband calls the newest member of the X-Men. We should try to be better home groomers, but perhaps after all these years, our annual expenditure on a close shave for some animal or other is income our vet counts on. We wouldn't want to let him down by skipping the spring clipping. After all these years, it's a springtime tradition.
