Bathing the Mutt

Since the diagnosis, we haven't been taking Mutt to get groomed. We've washed her a couple of times--she considers a "walk on the beach" to necessarily include a "roll in the sand"--but it's too cold now to spray her with the hose on the deck. She doesn't like the bathroom shower; when she realizes that we're herding her there, she digs her feet in and refuses to budge. I have to scoop her up and carry her in. Once she's actually in the shower, she sighs and says "Oh all right then, if you must" and resigns herself to it, but she doesn't enjoy it. So today we tried her in the big tub upstairs. When she goes to the beach or the pool, she usually plunks herself right down, so we figured that it the tub was half full of warm water, she might do the same. But no. She was fatalistic about it but as soon as we hinted it was okay for her to get out, she scrambled out and away.

The girls at PetSmart invariably cool "Oh, she's such an angel, she was perfect" and so forth, which makes me wonder whether there's some other technique we should learn, or if their threshold for "angelic" is low.