Many years ago, several months after Wen and her husband had brought Casey home as a little puppy, his hair coat had grown and he looked quite shaggy. They agreed that they could save some money by grooming Casey themselves, rather than taking him to a professional groomer, so they went to Sears and bought electric dog clippers.
Neither one of them had ever used clippers on a dog before but they were determined that they could do a decent job, so one Saturday afternoon, they constructed a table with boards resting on two sawhorses in the garage and Wen put Casey on the table and plugged in the clippers.
Their plan was that one person would steady Casey while the other person used the clippers, but they quickly learned that Casey not only didn’t want to stand still, but he didn’t want to have anything to do with their grooming attempt!
After nearly two hours of grooming “torture” by two novices who honestly had no idea what they were doing, everyone in the garage was extremely frustrated. Casey’s haircut looked terrible because he never stopped moving and the two “groomers” who were taking forever to try to even out their Scottie cut (hack job) were covered with Scottie hair and extremely irritable.
Finally, Casey decided that he had enough. He bit Wen a good one on her hand and the grooming session came to a quick halt. They had spent hours laboring in the garage, but Casey’s grooming never did get finished to anyone’s satisfaction that day. Wen ended up calling her relatives to get a recommendation for a professional groomer and the clippers eventually gathered dust on a shelf in the garage.
A valuable lesson was learned by all that Saturday: grooming is much harder than it looks!
Casey
