Today is a special day. Special because I’ve been spoilt by the super pet-friendly, pet loving, and pet grooming people at Mystical Pawprints. I’ve been groomed here before but this time the owner, Sharlene Thoma, insisted on sponsoring my grooming session in support of my #Ride4Huskies travelogue (that’s the hashtag to use if you’re sharing this post – sharing is caring :-).
My buddies, Shadow and Kiki (they’re The Fossil’s brother’s two huskies), also had grooming sessions yesterday. You should have seen Sharlene after blow drying Kiki – she looked like a stick of candy floss – all covered in Kiki’s hair! Shadow had to come back with me today ’cause his coat is really thick and Sharlene is a perfectionist – she wants every pooch that leaves Mystical to look, well, mystical. I love that word. According to the dictionary, mystical means “having a spiritual meaning or reality that is neither apparent to the senses nor obvious to the intelligence”, that’s me in a nutshell!
At Mystical Pawprints they use exclusive soaps and shampoos with natural oils and no harmful chemicals to clean your pets, so our eyes don’t burn and we smell really good (to human noses, that is).
So, after brushing, and wetting, and shampooing, and more brushing, we’re taken into the salon. Here we’re blow dried, which is really weird and then brushed some more. In fact, this process takes several hours ’cause our husky fur is so thick. We huskies have two layers of fur, an undercoat and a topcoat. We shed (blow) our undercoat twice a year, usually before a big season change. So grooming is really important, especially if you’re hopeless at brushing like The Fossil is :-).
Oh yeah, the title of this post “Pawing It Forward” is actually borrowed from Sharlene. That’s been Mystical Pawprints’ motto since being founded in 2017. It’s her way of saying that any adopted pooch (or cat, I guess) will get a free grooming session. How’s that for commitment! And Mystical Pawprints has a branch in Hermanus too (I walked that part of the Western Cape coastline on day 16 and day 17 of my Walk4Huskies journey in August 2021 – click on the numbers to read the stories).
Well, that’s it for today. Thanks to Mystical for a magical grooming and thanks to you for reading (and sharing) my blog post.
