On fleas and other pleasant matters

"Randy decided to give Isaac a bath; the flea situation had reached its usual autumnal pitch, and she had bought a bar of soap that smelled as if it could kill anything.

"She scrubbed and soaped and rinsed, and in his saturated state Isaac was revealed as a much smaller, less important-looking dog than he was when he was dry and fluffy. (Perhaaps that was one of the reasons for his horror of baths.) The air positively pulsed with the odor of strong disinfectant as whole flea communities gave up the ghost."

~Elizabeth Enright, "Spiderweb for Two"

Today Beowulf the Hero got a bath, and it was pretty much exactly the same as Ms. Enright's description above with one very important difference.... Beowulf didn't only have whole flea communities, he was infested with whole countries of fleas. He was like the country of Japan... there were so many fleas they practically had to live on top of each other. I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed with the flea soap, and was even reduced to such cruel tactics such as dunking him to expose the fleas on his face.

Recap: It. Was. Terrible.

Fleas were dying all over the place. While I worked the soap into his fur (which is actually so floofy it takes almost half a bottle of soap to work... I blame it on his Alaskan ancestors) dead fleas got on my hands and arms and-ick-even under my fingernails. Let me repeat, in case you somehow missed that; dead fleas were under my fingernails.

Anyways, Beowulf is now mostly clean, and I put that flea-killer stuff on him to hopefully take care of the dozen left surviving. I'll probably have to give him another bath again soon, to try to take care of all of them before we leave for Virginia in May.