Daddybear, also known as our online and meatspace buddy Tom Rogneby, has published a helpful guide to washing your Labrador retriever. It's packed full of helpful advice. For example:
2. Barricade the gate to the deck stairs. This is crucial. It is amazing how agile a 13 year old lab is when he doesn’t want to do something, and he’ll do a stutter step that will bring a tear to Jerry Rice’s eye and squirt right past you and down into the mud puddle that is your back yard.
6. Get your hose and start soaking the lab as best you can. Labs have, on average, 13.72 separate layers of fur, so this is going to take a bit.
- Side note – Labrador Retrievers, as a breed, were created for fishing and duck hunting, both of which require the dog to plunge into icy cold water. It can surprise the new dog washer to learn that labs can have that sort of fortitude, but are absolutely against the idea of cold hose water being applied to their person.
8. Once the wet dog is thoroughly coated in suds, get your hands into a ‘claw’ configuration and proceed to scrub the everliving whey out of that hound’s fur. You’re trying to scrub soap down into all of those layers of hair, so you might have to be a bit more aggressive. Take frequent breaks to flip handfuls of sudsy fur into the yard. The pile you make will survive several thunderstorms, but will be prized by the local gopher population as they soundproof their latest tunnel under your air conditioning unit.
- A side benefit to this activity is that it gets in your cardio for the day. Not only will you be bent over, vigorously moving your upper extremities repeatedly, but you’ll also be wrestling with a sopping wet dog that thinks you’re playing with him. At some point in this process, there will likely be as much suds on you as there is on the dog.
There's much more at the link.
Having grown up with a golden Labrador retriever, and owned another one during my last years in South Africa, I can attest to the truth of Tom's testimony. Both dogs would happily run and play in the surf at the beach, or in a stream in the mountains, or even run outside in heavy rain - but if you so much as reached for a bucket, their warning antennae kicked in, and they'd do a Houdini every time you tried to corral them for washing.
The only dog I knew who really liked being washed was a huge cross between a St. Bernard and another big breed, possibly a Great Dane. He weighed 140 pounds, and his shoulders were at waist height on even tall men. He had some sort of irritating skin condition, which plagued him particularly in the summer months; so if you appeared with a bucket, shampoo and a hosepipe, he'd eagerly run to meet you and submit to your ministrations with every sign of pleasure. A dog that big sure gave us a run for our money to get him clean.
Peter
5 comments:
Same. Growing up, my dad had a trained yellow lab for duck hunting. She’d break ice on a pond in the rural lands north of Houston to retrieve a bird. But getting the hose to wash off mud was apparently unbearable.
I had a yellow lab that trained other hunting dogs to wallow in mud puddles. I found it funny, their owners did not.
I was three hundred miles from home when my lab decided to tear a bag of reddish brown grout and roll it. Never mind he ignored the same bag for a week when I was home.
I had my wife call my dad and ask him to come over and hose off the dog. My dad was 220 pounds , the lab was 90. For some reason, my dad decided to bath him in the tub in the house. For the report I got, it was a draw, the bathroom was splashed reddish brown, my dad had scratches and scrapes but the dog was clean.
He was the best hunting dog I ever owned. Sid retrieved ducks, geese, pheasants, doves, woodcock, wood chucks, turkeys, chickens, muskrats and three skunks. I could have done without the skunks
Had a black lab/chow mix. Amount of hair he had in that he took after chow in amount of hair and in Tx heat he would pant 24/7 so he got a cut and bath at vet's every spring. Much easier on me and living way out it country with cow pasture next door and my horse pasture he had plenty to roll in. Lived to 16 and one of the greatest dogs I've ever had.
Thanks, Peter. Moonshine was a real handful to clean, and it was either bathe him to remove all the loose hair and schmutz, or shave him down and apply sunblock.
I take our two dogs to the creek for their baths. Throwing sticks for them is good exercise, as is the search for more sticks when they crunch them up in a friendly arguement over whose stick was that.
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