Horehounds… the Bane of a Country Corgi’s Existence!

Have you ever heard of “horehounds?” It is a type of herb that people make cough medicine from. Mom says it is supposed to “soothe” the throat. Well, I don’t know about THAT, but the plant itself is AWFUL!


When it flowers, it is always swarming with bees. It may smell ok, sort of like honey, but we keep our distance from it because we HATE the buzz of insects… flys, wasps, beetles, tarantula hawks, and BEES!


Not only do bees BUZZZZZZZ enough to drive a dog crazy, but if you snap at them, like you would at a fly, they will STING you like a wasp or tarantula hawk! Nasty things! Do NOT bite them… they BITE back!



Anyway, after the horehound bushes flower, they get clusters of sticker burrs all the way up and down each stem, and they have a hundred or more stems! When you walk by one of those nasty bushes, and just BARELY touch one of the stems, a BUNCH of the burrs JUMP on you and grab on, getting tangled in your hair!


The coarse, outer coat of a Corgi, is pretty good because most of them will come off fairly easily, but you sure don’t want to get them in your britches or belly hair! They are VERY uncomfortable to lay down on or sit on!


They tend to tangle up in soft undercoats or softer hair, and then when you pull them out, you pull out a bunch of hair with them, and that gets in your teeth… hath oo eber trieth to thpit ou a mouf full of ‘air wiff thtikerth in it? Nathty!!!


THEN, Mom will end up getting involved! The dog brush works pretty well, ooo, but, OUch, it ..... “WATCH IT, MOM!” tends to pull a lot, OUCH, too!




One of the main problems is that fuzzies like to dig their holes under the edges of the bushes… sneaky little rodents! It is our JOB to get them out of there! Mom yells at us for that, and she has been at war with the nasty plants for years…even had a lot of them knocked down, but then the head people in this area said our air was not good and made it so you can’t burn them out anymore. The past few years when Mom’s not been able to get around so well, they’ve grown back up in a lot of the places she had cleaned out. Most of the poison you put on plants to kill them doesn’t seem to work very well on them either.


Sadie is the one that REALLY has a problem with them. She tends to lead the hunts, and her coat is very soft and they snag and tangle horribly in it! She also HATES to be brushed, snicker… and would rather pull them out herself, but then she spits them on the rug or floor in the house, and she can't reach the ones on her head.




Mom says she doesn’t understand how come you can brush and pull and tug and have so much trouble getting them off of Sadie, but if Sadie walks within a FOOT of Mom or the furniture, a bunch of them will jump off of Sadie and onto Mom’s clothes or whatever else. (Snicker, snicker, snort…) “Poor, old Sadie…”

(OC’s Mom: OC, would you quit teasing Sadie, get out of her face, and LEAVE HER ALONE!)

Who, ME, Mom?