Bingo is usually a mellow guy, but he can't bring himself to sit for a bath. If it was up to me, I'd let it slide. I've always felt I was stripping him of his essential dogness by cleansing him of his scent.
But when he gets to about a week without a bath, other family members start to retch when he comes around and insist that I do something about it.
When he sees me coming with the leash I use to tether him for the bath he runs around the yard in a frenzy, leaving me lunging after him like a clown.
It amazes me that he knows he's going to get a bath. Most times when I get the leash, it's to take him for a ride. He never runs on those occasions. He's all over me with tail-wagging enthusiasm.
He must have incredible psychic powers to know when it's bath time. That or he gets a clue when he sees family members holding handkerchiefs over their noses when he's in the house.
Bingo used to elude me on bath day by hiding in a hedge where I couldn't reach him. I fixed his wagon with a $40 piece of plywood, a grate from a $100 screen door and two teen-agers who, for $20 each, built a crude barricade to the hedges. Hah!
My smugness was deflated when somebody suggested obedience classes. What, you say? I didn't have to remodel my house to corner the dog for a bath? I could have trained him to come on command?
Nah, I decided. Shar-pei are a stubborn breed. Bingo learns only what is to his advantage to learn.
It used to be my job, for instance, to give Bingo his monthly heartworm pill. I would conceal it a bit of liverwurst. He had one chance to do it the easy way. If he spit out the pill, I stuck it in the back of his throat and clamped his mouth until he swallowed.
My wife Maggie, who has a heart of gold when it comes to the dog, decided to apply more humane methods to the job. For starters, liverwurst wouldn't do. She hides the pill in steak - cooked medium rare just like he likes it.
She gave him his October steak-pill at dinner Tuesday. Bingo came running out of the kitchen with his prize. "Watch him and make sure he swallows the pill," she called to me and our daughter Treena in the family room. Bingo carefully chewed and swallowed the steak. Then he spit out the pill.
Maggie dragged the dog back into the kitchen and stuck the pill in another piece of steak. He came back into the family room, ate the steak and spit out the pill. This repeated until he had gone through half of a good-sized ribeye.
"Maggie," I finally asked, "what are you doing?"
"I'm teaching him to take his pill," she said.
TREENA could take no more. "You're teaching him that every time he spits out the pill, he gets another piece of steak."
"Never mind," Maggie said. "He's coming out again. Make sure he swallows the pill."
We were beginning to worry that he would finish his steak and get into ours before this was over. "Yes," we said, "this time he swallowed the pill."
After dinner, when Maggie was out of the room, I fetched the pill from where Bingo had spit it under an end table. I stuck it in the back of his throat and clamped his mouth until he swallowed it. Hah!
