Today was spa day here at the Moby… for our livestock. Mostly Gypsy. You see, a week ago, I noticed that she was having a skin issue, and at first, I thought she might have gotten into a tussle with another dog as she had escaped a day or two before that. Her snout and top of her head had some scabby wounds on her. When I noticed the next day that her legs and paw pads were affected as well, I took her in to the vets.

They did a skin culture and put her on some short term antibiotics just in case it was an infection, or they suspected ringworm! Highly contagious! Oh my! I’ve never seen that before, nor had a pet with anything nasty like that.

If you are not one to like icky pictures, scroll down a few shots…. it’s not pretty.

Well to make a long story short… she has something called sebaceous adenitis (sometimes called granulometous sebaceous). Okay. It’s something akin to seborrhea in humans, but this is a dog thing. I was worried it might even be mange, but it’s not, thank goodness! Apparently young dogs and elderly dogs tend to be more at risk of it, but there are even some breeds that are more prone to it.

The vet wanted to start a fairly expensive sounding treatment and to be honest, I’m just about tapped out of vet money, so I started to poke around on the web. The one thing that I read over and over was that it was mainly a cosmetic condition, that generally it was not painful or itchy, just kind of vaguely uncomfortable. It can get bad, but generally at this stage it’s not tooo bad. She just looks ucky.

Well I kept noticing that folks were treating this condition with over the counter Selsun Blue shampoo, then a rinse of hydrogen peroxide and then…. Bag Balm. Yep, that medicated cow udder cream. And most said that within a treatment or two, there was major results. I knew I would have to clip her down, because Belgians have this super thick undercoat that makes it hard to even get down to the skin! At the vets, that clip down alone was expensive.

Since it looked like the vet solution was going to be expensive with a lot of medications, I thought, I would give this internet cure a chance and see how it worked. I certainly wouldn’t want to compromise her health or put her through any discomfort or pain, but this seemed to be fairly straight forward. So I went to the store, got a $10 basic clipper, some shampoo, peroxide and the Bag Balm. $30 bucks.

And we got started. I never thought there would be SO much hair on a dog!

This was only one of four different clippings! Honest! It took almost four hours with a few breaks to clip her down! And even then, her coat was not super short, but definitely much much shorter. She looks like a weird black wolf with like mange. Okay, hardly a flattering picture. More like a weird black shortcoated German Shepherd. Yeah. We told her that going into the dog witness protection program was the only way for her to be safe. She just looked at us with this pathetic look saying, I’m covered in scabs, you just cut off my coat and I think if I have a chance, I’m going to go in the woods and crawl in a hole for a month. My beautiful show dog of years gone by… a victim of my own weird coat shaving.

In my defence, I must say that the second side of the dog looks MUCH better after I got my mojo on with the clippers. I think if I shaved a couple more dogs I might actually get the hang of it! HAHAH… Sorry Gypsy!

Once outside, she was pretty happy and ran around a bit and did some good rolling in the grass. I brushed out some of the thick coat areas and the girls got the bath spa ready to go.

I left her tail intact and I think it sort of looks like a pony tail. I always wanted a pony!

Evee was following around and watching the whole thing with great fascination. She’s not too keen with the hose yet, but Gypsy loves to play in the water. Jessy gave them both a good play time before bath time.

Evee was so busy watching Gypsy get washed that she didn’t notice that the little tub was ready for her! So pathetic looking, isn’t she? She’s not too thrilled with being wet yet. But she’ll get there. With all the gardens and Gypsy around, she will learn that hose play in the summer is a lot of fun.

Gypsy loves to use the hose waterpik for keeping her teeth nice and tidy!

Since we have bad fleas in our area and thankfully, so far, we’re not infested, we decided that the kitties needed a quick dunk for the start of the season. We have some of that CapStar treatment as well, so we gave them a quick dunk and they’ll get the CapStar tomorrow and then a bit of Frontline afterwards. I do not want to recreate the efforts of last year. I wish there was a better way, but around here there are so many half-feral cats and other critters that it’s really tough to stay flea free with dogs and cats that are outside critters. I’ve read that aggressive vacuuming is a very good way to keep the population down. It breaks the cycle by sucking up the critters and their eggs. Also we don’t have a lot of carpeting, and I think soon we’ll be pulling up the girls carpeting soon and laying down a wood floor as they would like. That will help as well.

Luna may LOOK like she’s sitting and enjoying the tub of suddsy water, but to be honest, she’s about 2 seconds away from launching herself from the side and disappearing for several hours to make little kitty voodoo human dolls to torture us with. She wasn’t too thrilled.

Gypsy and Evee hanging out afterwards and comparing notes on their experiences. Afterwards, we hung outside in the nice hot near 90 degree sunshine and played toss the stick and such with the canines. It was important that Gypsy skin get a chance to dry up nicely, to help dry up some of the scabs and such. She did some good grass rolling and running about. She looks so odd to me! She looks like a weird black Malinois, the short haired breed of Belgians! Or like a weird buffalo dog. I know her coat will never really grow back as nicely, and I wish that I didn’t have to clip her down, but to be honest, she had some matted areas that we clipped clear and boy did she like that. I itched her real good and she was thrilled. As she’s been aging, her hair has become more difficult to keep nice. She has arthritis in her knees and she doesn’t like you grooming around her back legs much. This was a nice clean cut to get that area nice and in better grooming. In a day or two, I’ll probably do a little more clean up trimming, but Jessy, I and Gypsy were getting very weary of the clip down, so it is what it is for today.

Once she was good and dry, a few hours after her bath, we got out some treats and some towels and the can of Bag Balm. All we needed was a few candles and some New Age music in the background and our girl would have gone to sleep she was so relaxed. Instead she just laid there as we rubbed and massaged all her ucky spots, groaning and moaning like only a shepherd can do when they are happily in a blissful moment. When we were done, she got some treats and she laid there in the middle of the room for a good hour or so, snoring and happy. She’s a little greasy looking as we really slaghtered that stuff on, but I think we accomplished something good today at the very least. I’ve seen that ointment do some great stuff on skin issues, both man and beast. And there are thousands and thousands of people singing it’s praises. We’ll report on the condition in a few days when we repeat the shampoo and slather her up again with another dose!

Tomorrow, Tim’s coming over and we’re building the last raised bed, and doing a bunch of this and that and I HOPE to get some of my plants into the ground!!! It’s supposed to FINALLY be hot, sunny, and NOT RAINING for a week. I feel so far behind, it’s almost JUNE!

Actually, I’m about 10 days past the official start of the season. So I think we’ll be okay.