Fat Actress

The highly-anticipated debut of Shadow on the Animal Planet's Groomer Has It finally happened this week; we caught the 8:00 pm showing on Saturday.

It was very exciting to finally see our little celebrity on the small screen as the filming actually occurred back in early November; blog followers might remember the post. The theme for the groomers was how to groom larger (translate...fatter) dogs to minimize their girth. I wasn't super excited about that category when we first went down to LA for the filming, and I must admit that I was even less excited about it when I realized that the name of the episode was "Piggies" (there was also a challenge to wash pot-bellied pigs...a cute connection, I suspect some producer believed).

There was also a tone to some of the groomers that the owners of this group of dogs was irresponsible in not taking care of their dogs, feeding them too much and not exercising them enough. Not the case, as the twice per day walks (often totaling more than 4 miles) and daily activity that all of the Newton dogs get. We are also not big on the table scraps for the pups. Letting all of that judgement fall to the side, how did Shadow do?

Cassandra, the groomer assigned to handle Shadow seems to be having some sort of personality conflict with the judges and the other participants, which netted out as a 15-minute penalty slapped on her by another groomer, Marco (he got kicked off, so his strategy didn't pay off in this case). Cassandra was fairly bothered by the penalty and combined with the difficulty in grooming Shadow, she landed in the bottom 2 for the episode.

The judges recognized that Shadow was a difficult case to groom (things have never been right since someone shaved her to her "dog in a sheep suit" look over a year ago), so Cassandra managed to hang on because the job that Marco did on his dog was worse by comparison.

Either way, Shadow has lived her 15-minutes of fame, albeit with the title of fat actress!