the pawgiene routine

Okay, I'll come out of the closet. I have a thing for nattily groomed dachshund paws. Our previous two boys struggled too much in their younger years and were too arthritic in their older years to maintain a rigorous nail trimming schedule. By the time they became immobile and we carried them practically everywhere, their paws were like gnarled white boots tipped with bear claws. They did not have nails to be proud of, but both humans and dogs agreed the bear claw look was better than the trauma of frequent nail cutting, and we loved them, claws and all, til the day it was time to say goodbye.

Baxter has been a much easier sell on the nail trimming front, which isn't the same as saying trimming Baxter's nails is easy. Keeping Baxter's nails nubby cute comes with diligence and patience. And an extra set of hands doesn't hurt either. In our earliest days with Baxter, I tried the same bypass clippers that I used on our pair of boys, sticking to the method that worked so well before, of cutting nails while the subject was sound asleep on our sofa. While then ten-month-old Baxter gently made suckling noises to the dreams inside his head, I cleaved each nail in small amounts as a chef would shave a truffle, in hopes of avoiding the painful surprise of cutting into the quick. But two weeks later the inevitable happened, and the jig was up. This dachshund was too young and smart to sleep through anything he didn't want to have happening to him.

I next turned to all sorts of files - ceramic, metal, and emery - for human, dog, and even wood - and finally settled on the alternate use of the coarse side of a human nail file and a diamond cut swedish style foot file. Filing each nail, one by one, all while Baxter laid on his back atop a supportive pillow. Not unlike a day at the spa for Baxter, but incredibly time consuming and exhausting for his human. Surely there was something better for both of us.

By the time I was ready to move on from files, the rotary pet nail tool ads started appearing on tv. I was intrigued and tempted, but leery of overpaying for what might be a scary, loud piece of single-purpose junk. So I drove all over town in search of the Dremel Stylus, a cordless wonder that I knew to be fairly quiet and powerful from having worked with one at a friend's house. A tool that I could use for crafty projects should this whole experiment backfire.

But backfire it thankfully did not. It probably helped that I introduced dremel slowly, and always ended Baxter's early encounters before he had time to consider it foe. For the next eight weeks or so, the dremel worked itself in to his pawgiene routine, a couple of nails at a time. I experimented with various speeds and found that a setting of 2 was too slow to effectively remove nail quickly, and a setting of 4 was too fast and could cause uncomfortable heat buildup if the dremel lingered too long in one spot. I determined that 3 was the Goldilocks of settings, juuust right for Baxter's nails if I kept the tool in constant motion like I should. By the time the dremel replaced all the manual file work, it was clear that one more change to the new process was in order. Baxter's nails would be much better shaped if the dremel-er was not also the person holding the dremel-ee. And thus was born our two person dremel process, with me dremelling away while dad holds Baxter in his lap.

Baxter endures his mostly biweekly pawgiene sessions with begrudging tolerance, though he sometimes likes to test the waters to see what he can do to shorten the experience. He is a dachshund, after all. A curious wet nose too close to the sanding drum, a tug of his stubby paw out from grasping hands. But all in all he's been a good sport with my desire to maintain the cuteness of his paws. I'm sure he wonders what the fuss is all about. They're just paws, he thinks. If a rabbit doesn't care what they look like, why should he?