5,000 Strands of Dog Hair and Counting
When the man from the water district came up to check our water which had been tasting a bit 'off' lately, he refused to actually taste the water. There was a dog hair on the side of the faucet and he immediately regaled me with a story of a woman who got e-coli from her dog hair on her faucet.
I told him I 'd be dead by now if that were the case. In our house, there 's dog hair in and on everything. Not tons, but a few strands here and there, perhaps a small tumbleweed down the hall. Ok. So the dogs live in the house. We don 't have large kennel runs outside, but they do go outside, and run up and down the paths that were built for them on the hill. The higher they go, the colder it must get, because they grow extra hair in the winter. That heavier coat is needed to keep them warm, for the hour or so they deign to run back and forth thinking mean thoughts about squirrels and deer cavorting just outside their fence. Come summer, they have to shed all that extra hair and what better place to do it than rolling around on the living room rug? While also thinking evil thoughts about squirrels and deer.
I realize there are more than capable people who do not allow their dogs on their furniture. They must put spike strips on seat cushions. Wadded up aluminum foil on sofas. And somehow they have invented a sure proof method for keeping dogs off their bed. We have, I must admit, failed at all of these.
Giving up, I bought a leather sofa since it 's easier to wipe down. An added benefit, I 'm told, by someone who has more dogs than I do, is that it doesn 't break the hair on the dog 's coat. I 'm so glad to know that. I would never want to break a single hair on their already overproductive coats.
When we take LacyLu, our glorious big galoot of a borzoi, racing, I am convinced the reason she doesn 't win is that her coat is so heavy that it creates wind drag. I 've thought about clipping her, but that luxuriant growth would grow back like magic in a week. Besides, it looks so lovely wafting around her as she runs at the back of the pack.
Do not confuse size with hair growth, I have learned. The smaller the dog, the more hair it can produce, when necessary; and hair is an important ingredient in pillows, bedding, and on lampshades. It diffuses the light so that you can read the dog-eared pages.
When my children were little, they made stone soup. No one laughed at that. As they got older and we had various and sundry pups, the stone soup began to look a lot like more conventional soups. Beef barley. Chicken soup. Pumpkin ginger soup. Of course you might detect a smidgen of dog hair say, that eluded the dishwasher in any one of these. But no one complained. Not if they wanted to eat.
I suppose the man from the water district is right, hygienically speaking. I look down at my clothes are realize everything I own has some remnant of dog hair on it. When my daughter lived in Singapore she would remark that the gifts I sent on birthdays and holidays always had dog hair on them. That dog is now gone to the great barber shop in the sky. But her hair lives on. Country by country, wherever we travel, we take the hair of the dog with us.