Last weekend, I tricked our dog, Duke, into letting me shave him. It had been really hot for weeks and Duke had been very uncomfortable walking around in his fur coat. I couldn’t find a dog groomer who had an opening before mid-August, due to COVID-19 restrictions, so I ordered a trimmer to shave him myself.

The trimmer arrived on Friday from Amazon. I had no plans for Saturday, so it seemed the perfect time to shave him. The only thing that worried me was that I had never used a hair trimmer on anyone or anything in my life. But I thought, “How hard could it be? I’ll just take it slow and easy.”

First, I started off by brushing him, which he loves. It’s like a luxurious body scratch to him. Then, when he wasn’t looking, I switched his brush for the electric trimmer.

It was nice and quiet, like the ad claimed it would be, so he didn’t even react to the switch. Things started out smoothly enough. The razor didn’t cut off too much too quickly. Actually, very little hair came off. I began to worry that it was going to take a week to shave him. And then I discovered that I was holding the razor upside down. After that, things speeded up considerably.

Once I held it right-side-up, the trimmer took off. I lost all control of the thing. It cut so deep that Duke had big holes in the top of his back. It didn’t break his skin, thank God, but it got right down to skin level. I found the power button and turned it off. Then I assessed the damage. It was pretty bad. Duke had a body full of long, thick, orange hair –– and gouges on his back that revealed the color of his skin (grayish). Now I had to match the length of the rest of the hair on his long, 135-pound body to those naked patches on his back.

It was just like when I cut my bangs. I cut them and they’re uneven, so I cut more, and they’re still uneven, so I cut more until I look like a serial killer.

But, back to Duke. He was so good. He only ran away once, and not far –– only into the house. He eventually came back and allowed me to shave him. I shaved for hours. We took breaks. We took naps. We had snacks. But we always returned to the task at hand: trying to match the length of the rest of his body hair to the length of his back hair. That did not prove, possible, however. I soon realized that I would have to shave him hairless to make his hair even, and I didn’t think that look would work for him.

So, we spent most of the day on the deck. Piles of hair accumulated around us. Whenever Duke decided to eat a hunk of hair, I would distract him with a treat and sweep up the debris. As I shaved, I discovered the different settings on the razor.

I used to hear my husband and son tell the barber that they wanted a #4 on top and #2 on the sides and back, but I never really thought about what that meant. Until Saturday. On Saturday, I discovered that there were cutting settings right on the razor –– but not until I had been shaving for at least two hours. There were also “limit combs,” that had inches marked on them. I supposed they were to limit how short the razor could cut, but I didn’t use them because Duke’s hair was so long and so thick that the razor cut nothing when the limit combs were attached.

Duke, as I said, was very cooperative. But he didn’t like standing for his shave so he reclined on the deck most of the time. This limited me to doing one side at a time. After I finished one side, I would have to physically roll him over so I could do the other side, and then roll him on his back to do his stomach. (The stomach shaving didn’t go very well at all. I didn’t change the razor setting and he had much less hair on his stomach than on the rest of his body to start with, so now he has no hair on his stomach at all, except patches that refused to come off.) When I finished his stomach and both sides, I had to lure him, with a dog biscuit, into standing up so I could compare his sides.

Of course they didn’t match. The hair lengths weren’t even close. It was at this point that I noticed that his face and rear had been completely ignored. So, I started on his face while he was standing. All of a sudden, Duke threw himself back down on the deck, causing me to gouge out more hair, but this time right above his eyes. “Great, just great,” I thought. “Now I have to match the rest of his head to the gouged-out areas. While he was standing, I also noticed that when I thought I was shaving his stomach, I had, in reality, shaved not only his belly but halfway up both sides of him, unevenly. I now had a dog who looked like he had lain in acid.

So, I put in a few more hours trying to even things out and trim his bottom. The bottom went well. That’s the only area that looks halfway normal, though. The rest of him is either bald or has visible trimmer tracks in the remaining hair. I don’t even want to talk about his back anymore. I just hope people don’t think he has mange.

At some point in the late afternoon, we both got bored, so we went inside to eat. Duke currently looks like a patchwork quilt, but he’ll never know, as long as I keep him away from the judgy dogs in our neighborhood.

At least he’s cooler, now –– in temperature, if not appearance.