A Tale of a Tail

**Warning:  no knitting actually takes place in the text of this tragic story**

If I could figure out how to spin dog hair into something usable – or even remotely desirable – I’d have it made.  Two of our dachshunds are long-haired (one is actually my daughter’s), so I definitely have an abundance of canine fur around.  That sounds kind of gross when I type it out like that, but nevertheless, the statement stands.  Actually, our dachshunds shed MUCH less than a lot of other dogs, but our long-haired fur babies present some interesting challenges.

This is Sophie, my daughter’s dog:

Sweet Sophie

Sophie is very sweet (no matter what The Husband says about her) and she is the product of our breeding my even sweeter Daisy, a short-hair ( and arguably the best dog ever)…

Daisy Mae

…and this wooly beast:

The Tig before the tragic incident

The wooly beast is Tigger, our only male.  I’ve mentioned before that Tigger chases light and shadows. It’s his only obsession since he was *ahem* “fixed”.  When Tigger chases light and shadows, he wags his tail, I assume from the sheer delight he gets from this seemingly pointless activity.  When Tigger wags his tail, it seems to create some sort of vacuum which causes anything in it’s path to become caught up in the joy, aka hair.  Until we raked this past weekend, it was usually just leaves that would ride in on the fur of Tigger’s tail.  Now that the leaves are gone, something far more sinister is lurking in the yard, hoping to get close enough to the happy tail in order to pounce: 

Evil lurks in the backyard...

That’s right, it’s some sort of vine.  I have no idea what it is, but it grows stealthily along the ground and you hardly ever see it until you try to, oh…I don’t know, rake the yard.  Then it rears it’s ugly head, getting tangled around the rake and refusing to let go.  Try to pull it up and you find that it runs for several feet, if not yards.  And The Husband and I have exposed it and set it loose on our poor, clueless, shadow-chasing Tigger.  When aggressive vine meets happy, hairy tail, the end result is this:

Shamefully de-flagged

There was no avoiding trimming Tig’s majestic tail flag (what the fur is referred to on a long-haired dachshund’s tail).  Untangling was not an option.  So sad.  Look, he’s devastated…

"Feed me..."

Or not…    

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