Smartassery

This past weekend I decided to trim the dog’s nails. I don’t do this very often because I have to do it by myself and the dog hates it. He would rather stick his penis in a blender than have his nails trimmed.

The dog is a pit bull, all of 50 pounds of muscle and hard headed attitude. First I start, as I always do, with trying to use food to get him to comply. ‘Sit’ and give him a treat.  

Now comes the fun part. The dog and I go through the sit-grab paw-stand game. The dog sits. I grab a paw and lift it up to try to trim the nails. The dog stands, which gives him leverage to pull against me. I push his rear down and he sits again. Start over.

The odds are against me (always) because the dog has infinite time in which to play this game and I have other things to do. Food is irrelevant…the dog knows that if he complies, the nails will get trimmed, which is tantamount to torture for some reason.

Twenty minutes of this and it’s time for plan B. This new strategy involves putting the dog in various wrestling holds that still allow me to hold each paw with one hand and trim the nails with the other. Two drawbacks:

1. The dog can still twitch his other three legs enough to cause me to trim the nails either too close or not close enough
2. The newly trimmed nails are extremely sharp, so now the beast gains weaponry to use against me as the process continues

After a wrestling/trimming session that could have headlined as a grudge match on any WWF program, the dog finally has trimmed nails. Unevenly trimmed, but trimmed nonetheless. At least one nail on each paw is trimmed too close, so during the match my t-shirt has become covered in blood.

My arms and legs are scratched up like I’ve been in a fight with a rabid bobcat, I’m covered in dog hair, and I’m sweating profusely. The dog is none the worse for wear except for the fact that he can now walk properly.

As I’m about to jump in the shower, the doorbell rings. Today, out of all days in the year, the Jehovah witnesses have decided to come save my soul. But this time the exchange goes a little different:

Me: Yes?

Jehovah Witness: Uh… 

Me: Can I help you?

JV: Actually, never mind

And then the whole family turned around and bolted for their van. Now you know what to do. You are welcome!

This entry was posted on Monday, June 18th, 2007 at 4:47 pm and is filed under raves. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.