Eww, That's Gross

Let me tell you a story about hair loss...

As a twelve-year old, my grandpa got a book of Gary Larson cartoons. There was this one that I remember scratching my head about, one that showed a dog scrutinizing himself in a mirror, looking worried, while the caption said something like, "When young dogs experience premature mange." After looking through dictionaries and encyclopedias, which were not helpful (where was the Internet when you needed it?), I had to make my own assumptions, so I just assumed that dogs lost their hair, just like some humans, at some point in their doggy existence.

Later on in life, I learned that premature mange is the canine version of lice. They get in the fur/hair and sit there and make a dog scratch and scratch and scratch. Unlike lice, though, whose only lasting effects are the smelly scalp and the social ostracism back at school, mange causes the fur/hair to fall out. So if you had, say, a Chihuahua with mange, you might begin to find large patches of fur on every surface of the house.

Okay, I admit it, that last sentence is about me. Tanya has mange. We noticed this nasty looking rash on her shoulder about two weeks ago, where her hair had begun to fall out. We thought it was where she'd gotten some shots and maybe had the anesthesia when she had her teeth cleaned. We laughed about mange, but it didn't occur to us that our dog might have it.

But as I was doing a little much needed cleaning yesterday, I started finding these large crop-circles of Tanya hair. On the couch. On the floor. On my pillow. Yuck. I mentioned it to Russ and he started picking through her fur, like a chimp looking for nits, and he groaned. "Oh man," he said. "There's a bald spot on her butt now." That's when we knew it was time to call in the experts, our vets at Banfield who excel at pet whispering. And sure enough, one skin scrape later, she officially has mange. What it really means is that means she'll have four very expensive baths tomorrow.

Luckily for us, it's the kind of mange that's dog specific. They're also the lazy kind of mange, which means that they don't hop, they lounge. That means we don't have to burn all cloth exteriors of our house. So that's fortunate. But it's a good thing I decoded that Gary Larson cartoon all those years ago -- if I hadn't, I might've just thought that Tanya was naturally losing her hair, like all good dogs eventually do.