Something I have introduced in Mischa’s life is showers. He is your typical dog and loves to roll in anything mucky, and after a while he does not exactly smell like roses. When you add his farting abilities to the list you may well wonder why I kept him.
I’ve managed to get his farts down to a bearable level by putting him on a diet of two small meals per day and solely on dog food. He does not get leftovers, and the only time he gets something that falls outside the recommended for dogs category is when someone feeds him something behind my back. Ok, there are exceptions. If I have boiled white rice leftover after dinner I will mix a little of that into his food. And the odd grated carrot and spoonful of olive oil. Yes, I spoil him rotten.
The coat-stench, however, is something that occasionally has to be tackled by a shower and copious amounts of shampoo. Daily grooming, even with the furminator, is not enough. And the undercoat works like a magnet on dirt.
The first time I bathed him I spent half an hour wrestling him into the bathtub. Then I spent another half hour wrestling him back into the bathtub. He was a slippery as a wet bar of soap even before we got started.
Next time I had read about this wonderful trick to smear peanut butter on the inside of the rim to get him to willingly jump in and remain there while licking the sticky substance off. Total failure. He doesn’t like peanut butter. And that says a lot about the world’s number one scavenger who will normally eat anything from mouldy bread to old bones covered in hair and dirt, taste other dog’s pee and lick the space where his balls should have been. I know. A delightful image. But the peanut butter was a waste of time. So I tried to dot pieces of sausage on the rim along the wall. It worked! And kept him there for exactly the nanosecond it took him to inhale all the pieces and leap back out. This was even before I started him on his diet in earnest and goes to show that when there is sausage involved, the dog can jump.
Since I moved I now have a large handicap-sized shower instead, and that makes my life a lot simpler and Mischa’s life a lot more miserable. Because now there is nowhere in that room where I can’t reach him with the shower. And that just makes him so indescribably miserable not even Disney could have drawn a sadder, big-eyed puppy.
He is, however, getting more used to it. And today we hardly wrestled at all. I think there is something about this body-rub that isn’t so horrible, even if it involves shampoo all over. The dull bit is trying to get it all out again. His coat is so thick it takes well over ten minutes to rinse him. And that is the point when he starts acting up and shaking himself and generally being a nuisance. And since that leaves me as wet and soapy as him I have learned that I may as well have a shower while we’re at it too, so it’s ended up being a joint venture.
Today we went to Donau Insel with Thomas and his kids, and the first thing Mischa did was to roll in the mud. There is a lot of it now after the Danube has been over its edges for a while with the latest floods, and no, it does not smell particularly nice. He had a great time, kept leaping into the New Danube (Neue Donau) and rolling in whatever muck was available. Though I dried him off as well as was possible and gave him a brush afterwards, he was still less than delightful and sweet-smelling by the time we got home. So it was shampoo time again. With his new shampoo which is far more expensive than mine with no perfume and made for dry skin and so on and so forth. I repeat; yes, I spoil him. I don’t have kids. Give me a break.
This time he walked calmly into the shower and stood there, head down, misery and doom shining out of him. He knew there was no escape. We went through the lengthy introductory wetting-process — is coat is both difficult to get wet all the way through and dry again after. He was still calm. Then it was shampoo time. He remained calm through that too, even seemed to enjoy the body rub. Well, he is a male, if ball-less, and he was being shampooed all over by a naked Scandinavian woman. Most men would not protest. When I reached for the shower head for the rinse he nearly slipped soapily out of my grasp, but I was prepared and wedged him back into place and rinsed and rinsed with him looking ever more as if he was ready to stick his paws in his air and cry “shoot me now — have some mercy!” — the whimp.
I almost got his towel around him before he shook violently, covering the dry bit of the bathroom in water, soaking the wooden door, and then went on a crazy run around the flat leaving a trail of water on the floorboards and bumping into walls with screeching breaks. I do wonder why dogs do that.
By the time I finished my own shower and re-joined him he was looking so down-trodden it would have broken any normal person’s heart. But not me. I know how to cheer him up. I bring out the hair-dryer. I’m being serious here. The moment he sees the hair-dryer he turns into a large, hairy ball of joy and literally tap dances around me until I get it plugged in, put a towel on the floor for him to sit on and turn it on. Then his face just melts with the sheer enjoyment of being dried and rubbed and cuddled to make up for the torture of the shower.
And when he leans closer to me, nuzzling his head under my chin, I know I am forgiven.


