Shaved poodles

You know how some people shave their head to show solidarity with their friend or family member who lost their hair from chemo? Well, let me tell you what happened to my poor, shaved poodles.

Poodles don’t have regular dog fur that sheds all the time and stays short. Instead, they have something more like sheep’s wool that doesn’t shed. It keeps right on growing…and growing…so they need regular clipping; about every 6 weeks.

My poodles are typically beautiful after a good grooming:

When we went to Boston for my surgery, we left the poodles with my mother-in-law. After a few weeks I realized the dogs were going to need groomed. I hired a mobile groomer so my mother-in-law didn’t have to take them into a shop. This was right before all the shops were closing due to the virus. The mobile groomer was insanely expensive, more than I’ve ever paid, but I didn’t have a lot of choices and was just grateful to find someone willing to go out there and groom my dogs.

I didn’t even know there was an issue until John got down there to pick them up a couple of days later. He called me and warned me I would just have to laugh about it, otherwise I’d cry. He said he has never seen such a bad grooming job in his life.

Rosie looks like a miniature lab!

Yes, that’s Rosie! I guess she’s still sort of cute, but it’s shocking! She usually looks like this (except not usually with an ocean in the background):

It’s funny that the groomer didn’t even do them the same. She completely shaved Rosie, but then she left some hair on Kai’s head and ears – but it’s cropped way too short. The poor guy looks pretty funny.

You would have thought that if the groomer imagined that she knew what she was doing, she would have at least done them the same. Maybe after completely shaving Rosie she decided she goofed (yeah maybe?) and then tried to google-image what a poodle cut is supposed to look like before starting in on Kai. Colossal fail.

Our third dog, Kira, got lucky and escaped the butcher-groomer entirely. She’s the most timid of our three dogs, so I had told the groomer to do her last. When it got to be her turn, the groomer wouldn’t do her because it turns out she has a wound on her side. We don’t know how she got hurt.

After we got her home to Albuquerque, we cut the matted hair around the abscess, cleaned it and applied ointment. Now she has a cone collar on so she will leave it alone. We have some antibiotics and are hoping we can successfully treat her abscess at home and not have to take her to the vet.

The dogs are like the goldilocks story. One is completely shaved, one half shaved, and one unshaved and in a cone. None of them are “just right”. No matter, we don’t mind, who is going to see us anyway? We’re all in quarantine. It’s backyard ball time!

I kept myself entertained the other day by sifting through my 41,372 pictures looking for good dog pictures from better days. So here’s a few more, enjoy…