Digging the dog beds

We have from time to time been contacted by customers who says that the covers shed fluff in the house. This is of course worrying because we wonder if there is anything wrong with the dog beds. Recently a lady was getting very worried, she said, because there was fluff in the house. We duly sent her a new cover, but asked to see the old one, which she sent us in the post. As I opened the parcel I could see the scratching area immediately as there was one favourite place in the middle of the bed, where the dog obviously had a massive dig daily. The pile was all “combed” in one direction, so the dog had clearly just stood in the same place each time. One of our dogs also gives one of his dog beds a good scratch during the night. I really don’t know why they do this, maybe they like the heat it must generate in their paws or they just have a nesting instinct that this somehow satisfies.

Sometimes when we are out working the dogs and maybe have to stand around waiting for something, some of the dogs start making their own grass dog beds by our feet. It is really quite sweet to see them dig and turn and dig and turn till they eventually lie down in their natural nest. Maybe this is what the domesticated canine is doing when they dig.

I took photographs of this cover, but I thought it would be interesting to see what damage the dog had actually done to the bed and perhaps put some figures on this. So I cut out an A4 size from the dug up place and the same size from somewhere where the dog had just been using the cover as normal. Then I weighed the pieces and the difference in weight was from 41grams in the normal to only 35grams in the scratched. So the dog had dug away 17% of the surface.

We did offer the customer the Fluffie Tuffie as it would seem to be a bit more resistant, but it seems to me, that no matter what dog beds you would give this particular kind of dog, they would be scratching holes in it. The cover was only less than a year old!!