Hair of the Dog
Susan Ewing
Grooming double-coated dogs is essential for their health and well-being, especially in the spring, when all that lovely, soft, warm undercoat loosens. Apparently the loose hair prickles and itches, and my corgis want it out. I want it out, too, before the dust bunnies of hair turn into dust mastodons. I lift the dogs onto the grooming table, and I attack with comb and brush.
One year, a few springs back, I read that birds love to gather this hair and use it to line their nests. The idea appealed to me. Rather than waste all that nice, soft fur, I'd donate it to nature. Help the itchy dogs; help the wild birds.
Now, Martha Stewart I am not. I imagine that each spring, when her chow chows shed, she employs some creative method for gathering and storing all that undercoat. I imagine her skillfully attaching it to trees in handmade mesh bags, or winding smaller amounts around twigs in her shrubs and bushes, creating artful designs that add beauty to the yard while she waits for birds to retrieve the hair.
Our fenced yard contained no trees or bushes to festoon with fur, and I had no little mesh bags, but this didn't deter me. I thought that the fur would just waft away, eventually catching in shrubs and making itself available to the birds. I set up my grooming table in the backyard and started brushing.
I kept really huge clumps of fur on the table for later disposal, but the lighter wisps quickly blew away. The breeze was fresh, the sun was warm and there was lots of hair. I brushed and brushed, and the hair flew in the breeze. The problem was, it didn't fly far. It didn't drift over the fence and into the field. It settled in bunches in the grass and against the fence. Oh, well, I thought, sooner or later it will all blow away, or the birds will find it and carry it off.
Maybe this would have happened in time, but that night it rained. In the morning, the lawn was covered with soggy clumps of matted fur. Snags of it hung dripping from the fence wire. No self-respecting bird was going to get within a mile of the sodden mess, and it left a lot to be desired in the way of lawn ornamentation.
I'm smarter now. Now, I brush the dogs in the basement and save the hair in bags. On clear spring days, when there's not a rain cloud in sight, I take the hair and carefully place bird-sized mouthfuls in the forks of dozens of small branches of the chokecherry tree in our front yard. House finches, sparrows, chickadees - they all get fur-lined nests, and my yard is much, much tidier.
Martha, eat your heart out.
Susan Ewing, author of The Pembroke Welsh Corgi: Family Friend and Farmhand, lives with three corgis in Jamestown, New York.
Courtesy of
ASPCA
424 East 92nd St.
New York, NY 10128-6804
(212) 876-7700
www.aspca.org
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