bathing your cavie

So How often do you bathe your dogs?
What do you use?
Are tehre any good product review websites? we all know about the food review websites..but what about shampoo?

Oliver..had a never ending skin itch. even vet after vet, he never really found relief.



With maggie..shes been doing really good. she had had just a few baths (or runs under the water in the sink to clean her up.) but i noticed her skin was getting itchy..looked dry and i wanted to go find a good shampoo (she hadnt used shampoo before ..and this might be part of the issue)
so i took her to the park yesterday..she was a mud monster. i went to petsmart and asked them to recomend a shampoo, told them a bit of her dry itchy skin.
and they recomended GNC's moisurizing oatmeal dog shampoo.

I used it with her yesterday, and today she feels AMAZING.. soooo soft and oh just like when she was a baby. she isnt itching as much i notice..

so i think its good..but ive only found one review online..and it wasnt all that good..said she bathed her dogs a few times a week and they still stunk. lol so i was thinking maybe her dogs just stink? lol
but a few times a week.. is that too much? or how often do you guys bathe yours?

I don't about how often to bathe your puppy, but the Oatmeal Shampoo makes sense to me.

I used to give my children oatmeal baths for their eczema when they were little. Worked wonders.

I was going to suggest oatmeal puppy shampoo. Tess's vet had me use one when she was recuperating from flea bites (she's allergic). I'd put it on her and let it sit for about 15 minutes. Seemed to soothe her quite a bit.

I do think bathing twice a week is too much unless there's a medical reason though. Tess gets bathed at most once a month. For a pet not a show dog that seems sufficient (barring encounters with mud puddles of course! LOL).

Came back to add that I learned recently that people shampoo is bad for dogs because their skin has a different ph value than people's. hadn't known that before.

We've been using TrueBlue shampoo and conditioner on Skippy since we got him. 3+ years and we've not needed to use any other brand so far. We bathe him once every 4 weeks or so. Bear in mind though that he's indoors most of the time, if we take him out and he gets a little dirty we only wash his feet in between his big baths.

We've been dog sitting my daughter's Brittany. When he started bitting and chewing on himself I bought some oatmeal shampoo and a followup spray at Petco. It made all the difference. I then used it on Charlie and he likewise has wonderfully soft hair.

If you have been bathing Maggie very regularly, that may well be why her skin is getting dry. Frequent bathing removes the natural oil from the coat and if you dry with a hairdryer the heat will make the skin dry. Once a month is normally a maximum, mine get bathed 3 or 4 times a year. If they get really dirty in-between - which is usually just mud on legs and tummy rather than all-over filthy, unless they roll in fox droppings - swill them in water and towel dry, though I usually just let the mud dry on and brush it out. A dry shampoo can be useful in between baths as well. But definitely not a bath every time they come in from a muddy walk (this winter in the UK you would have been bathing them almost every day!).

Kate, Oliver and Aled

PS Even for fox droppings, tomato ketchup is very effective!

I use oatmeal shampoo and conditioner on my three (John Paul Pet - expensive spoilt pooches, :D), Maddie and Pippin get a bath every fortnight, but that's only because that's when they go to hydrotherapy. Rosie gets a bath about once every 2 months.
Maddie gets itchy in hayfever season, and the oatmeal shampoo and conditioner has proved to be the best stuff to soothe her skin.

Dogs should never be bathed several times a week -- that's for sure!! That often definitely would be a cause of dry, problem skin. not a solution for it :(. Keep in mind no dog in the wild would ever be bathed with any kind of soap -- not a normal activity and as Kate says, strips out needed oils that are necessary for both healthy skin AND coat.

Most dogs simply do not need frequent bathing -- they can be rinsed in water and/or brushed and that will remove 90% of dirt in the coat.I wash mine about the same schedule as Kate -- at most. Some vets say you could wash them once a month or so, but HAS to be a shampoo for dogs as the skin pH is different and human shampoos would be very harsh.

People who say their dogs still 'stink' probably shouldn't have a dog... :lol: -- they are not stuffed toys after all, they are DOGS and smell like DOGS... :). Not only that but they prefer odours we dislike and dislike odours we like -- so forcing them to 'smell good' with perfumes and scented shampoos all the time most overwhelm their far more sensitive noses. For us it would perhaps be like sitting in the midst of a smelly cat litter box! They tolerate an awful lot from us humans, don't they? :)

But for all those reasons -- I do really encourage people not to constantly wash and blow dry their dogs. Groomers tend to recommend doing dogs every 4-12 weeks, at most -- not more than monthly and certainly never several times a week.

Oh okay good! Then I'm doing fairly good then.
Dad always bathed Oliver and it was so long ago I was living with them I can't remember.
Even when she walked in duck poop I just rinsed her feet off.
I also yowl dry/ let her air dry in the warm house.
Dosnt take long.
Awesome. Thanks guys!!:)