It’s Tuesday at the Academy of Dog Grooming Arts in Arlington Heights, and that means tears.
“It’s hard,” said dog grooming student Marilyn Golz of River Grove. “It’s the older dogs that are the worst. They were loved at one time and then, maybe their owner died. . . . Now nobody wants them.” She has to pause for a moment, choked with emotion. Tuesday is the day grooming students use their skills to spruce up stray animals.
Animal rescue is always a tough business. Schaumburg’s Strays Halfway House, a volunteer organization that rescues strays in Schaumburg, Hoffman Estates and Palatine, had 850 animals brought in last year alone. Along with signing up volunteers to serve as workers or “foster parents” and asking kindly vets for discount medical services for spaying and neutering, local animal rescue advocates are going one step further by eliciting the help of local groomers to help make dogs and cats look more attractive to prospective adopters.
“I do it for the dogs,” said Sharon Panther, the owner and president of the dog grooming academy. “When you see these dogs with their ears all infected and their nails growing inward and their fur all matted, you can tell they’re really miserable. It’s an accomplishment for the students to see the dogs walking around afterward all happy, with their tails wagging.”
Panther dedicates Tuesdays to Save-A-Pet Inc., the no-kill shelter in Palatine that finds homes for 2,000 dogs and cats annually. Half a dozen of her day students (who complete 494 hours and 13 weeks of training before graduating) spend the day sudsing, trimming, cleaning and clipping an average of five dogs and cats weekly. It averages out to about $5,600 worth of free grooming a year.
“We put little bows on the tiny ones and bandannas on the big ones, you know, so they look cute in the kennel,” Panther said. Panther, an Inverness resident, also helps other area shelters, as well as Cats-Are-Purrsons-Too, a Chicago cat rescue group.
This day, students are working on Tim, a 10-year-old white German shepherd; Newman, a 2-year-old Gordon setter; Yapper, a youngish terrier mix; Battley, a 6-year-old mixed breed; and Mecca, a 2-year-old mixed breed. Fur fills the air like snow, and there is the sound of water running, as each dog gets a thorough shampoo.
Grooming student Nina Wagner of Woodstock is trimming Newman, preparing the big dog for a medicated bath. “See how scraggly he is?” she said. “We’ll trim him . . . get him all handsome so someone will adopt him.”
Panther believes it’s good for the students to see how some owners neglect their dogs, from physical abuse to improper nutrition and poor grooming.
It’s an emotional job; some of the animals arrive in such poor condition, their future happiness is uncertain.
“Everybody cries,” said Mary Galles, the academy’s office manager and an Elmwood Park resident. “Ninety percent of those dogs are wonderful.”
Strays Halfway House, a Schaumburg-based animal rescue group that places more than 100 dogs, 135 cats and 200 kittens each year in homes around the northwest suburbs, calls on the groomers of Chez Paws Inc. in Hoffman Estates to get animals ready for adoption. They turned to the groomers at Chez Paws because the business is close to the kennel where the strays are kept.
“We feel the grooming gives the dog a better chance of getting adopted, of finding a good home,” said Chez Paws dog groomer Sue Watson of Hoffman Estates.
Watson recalls one Shih Tzu brought in last summer whose fur was so matted the dog had to be very nearly shaved to the skin. After the dog was groomed, “A customer fell in love with her and adopted her and now she’s a very healthy, happy little dog,” Watson said. “That’s a success story.”
At times there are not enough adopters looking for pets, and some pets go unclaimed. That’s the reason so many who work in this field adopt some of the animals themselves. Panther said her students routinely adopt Save-A-Pet animals.
Kristi Johnson came to the academy in September to begin training as a dog groomer, and she didn’t leave empty-handed. She returned home to her understanding parents in Fairfield, Iowa, with a diploma, a 4-month-old German shepherd named Pete, a pygmy potbellied pig named Wilbur and a rabbit named Flower. She got Pete through Save-A-Pet, the pig from an unsatisfied owner and the rabbit from the academy, where it had been abandoned. (The pig remains much-doted-upon but has since been given to family friends–as a wedding gift.)
Johnson’s favorite part of the week was when she groomed Save-A-Pet animals, she said. When she first saw Pete, she knew she wanted to take him home.
“Oh, he was a mess,” she said. “He was dirty and little and he smelled like newspapers and he had ink spots all over him. . . . He’s kind of crazy. He has one ear that sticks straight up, and the other one hangs down. He’s adorable.”
———-
For further information on adopting animals, contact Cats-Are-Purrsons-Too, Box 59067, Chicago, Ill. 60659, 312-728-6336; Save-A-Pet Inc., 2019 Rand Rd., Palatine, Ill. 60074, 847-934-7788; Strays Halfway House, 847-351-3150.
