Once a month or so I have to trick my baby girl into going on a walk down the street and at least at first she is rather excited about this adventure. Once we get to a certain part of the streets though, she starts to get nervous and actually pulls back on the leash a bit, which is very rare for her because she is normally very obedient. I normally will pick her up at this point because the streets of Da Nang are not safe for dogs to be pulling away from you even though if I were to just give Nadi a stern warning, she would comply, but her tail would go between her legs and that makes both of us sad.
Why this fighting back? Well once a month she needs to get a haircut and she absolutely hates them.
We are in the hot time of year right now so when her fur gets to this level it results in us being able to do very little outdoors even if we go out there early in the morning. There is just too much insulation and the heat and humidity has her tongue hanging out of her mouth in just 5 minutes or so. There is only one solution, and unfortunately that solution means an hour or so of what she considers to be "doggy torture."
I think if it was left up to her that she would never get haircuts and seeing as how Shih-Tzus are incapable of shedding, it makes me wonder how they would have ever survived in the wild and I am thinking that they probably didn't. I believe this breed was engineered for people that want to have cute little doggies at their house whose only working purpose would be to let their owners know if some prowler is nearby and well, they are very good at that.
The above picture was the day before going to the groomers and here is one of the pictures after she came back, no doubt absolutely delighted to be out of that place.
She is normally quite exhausted after the 90 minutes or so that she has to spend at the groomers and while there is some spring in her step as we do the walk home, she is ready for sleepy-time once we get back on the cool floor of my air-conditioned apartment.
This one is a bit better because it almost looks like a smile with her one missing tooth up front.
The groomers always do this line on the paws and I thought it was strange. It certainly looks strange, but according to a friend of mine that runs a groomers this is just standard for cheap cuts. If you want them to do more than that they have to charge substantially more because it is very time-consuming...and this makes sense. When it grows out in a few days it looks normal again.
We celebrated her return home with this chew toy that feels like a piece of wood but has some sort of milky goo inside of it that dogs love but unfortunately it was a flop because Nadi's mouth isn't big enough and she lost interest in it almost immediately. In many ways I am happy that Nadi is not a "chewer" so I just took it away and gave her some other snacks instead. It wasn't thrown out, I gave it to one of the other dogs in the neighborhood that is substantially more grizzled than Nadi will ever be.
Then she decided to have a nap in one of the cutest ways that I have ever seen her do while she was staring at me on the sofa with her eyes struggling to stay open. It's such a rough life being my dog, you have to once a month do something you don't like to do and the rest of the time everything is provided for you. You have 4 beds in the house that are all kept clean and wonderful for you and even though those are available at all times you still want to sit in human places like on chairs and in the best part of the sofa.
She's a spoiled little angel, that's for sure.