April 5th, 2008

Something about living in Georgia has brought out some odd pet care strategies in our life.

My daughters still love to razz me for having vacuumed off Daisy’s coat after she wallowed in the black gumbo marsh mud down here. I hosed her off first, as best I could, and she was still pretty gritty even after she dried off, sooo… It made perfect sense to me to try the curtain attachment with our trusty Kenmore cannister vac. I would stress that she didn’t seem to mind my ministrations, and WAS acceptably clean to resume life indoors afterwards.

Well, today’s good news is that Ann has introduced a fun, new, weird pet care technique. This morning she rubbed Daisy’s fur with dryer-sheets…

If your next question is “Why?”, I’d be delighted to provide an answer, but I think I’ll ramble a bit in this run-on sentence to create a bit of suspense in the matter. It comes down to this:  Daisy HATES thunderstorms, and we have a day full of rumble-busters in the forecast, and Ann had heard from a neighbor-friend that it is as much the static-discharge from the storms as the thunder and lightning which upsets pets during storms. Dryer-sheets contain a substance which releases static-charge build-up in your clothes, and that will also work on your pet’s fur.  This is supposed to put the animal at ease when storms approach. For Daisy, who has a history of leaping through screened windows during a storm, this might be a good thing.

Take a look at Thunderstorm-phobia, a web-page on the subject, which mentions the dryer-sheet trick. And to see a dog being vacuumed clean visit the PetVac2 website…  (I always knew it was an ok idea!)