Scratching

D Vautier
11/2000

Our basset hound spends just about every waking moment of her life (which isn’t much) either sniffing or scratching.  It's a pretty big job since she has so much excess skin, in fact I would say she has enough skin for two or three dogs.  Therefore she has to scratch twice or three times as much as any other dog.  But nature has helped out somewhat since bassets have twice the paw size that regular dogs have so they only need to work half as hard.

Our dog doesn't have fleas or any kind of skin problem.  She just likes to scratch--sort of an emotional release.  We tried to set up no scratch zones throughout the house but this hasn't helped much since bassets can't read very well.  We also offered her special no-scratch incentives in the way of tasty morsels.  It didn’t help either. So she spends most of her waking hours scratching away.