Homemade Puppy Shampoo

I want to start this post with saying, please, please, please read the couple of short articles I have linked here before trying this shampoo on your pups.  I strongly believe that it is VERY important to educate yourself thoroughly before feeding, exercising, or grooming your pets.  You wouldn’t want to ever unassumingly do something that is harmful to your four-legged friend.

With that being said, here are a couple of articles I would love for you to read about grooming your pups.

Pet Md has a great article on maintaining your dog’s skin pH.  It is really a great explanation for why human shampoo is not good for your pets.

Cesar Milan has a post on his website with general guidelines on how often to bathe your pet.

You can research all day about how to best take care when grooming your pet, but I will just add a few notes as I go to save you some time. :0) 

My fur-babies spend a fair amount of time playing out in their big backyard, but for all intense purposes they are indoor dogs.  They come inside during the hottest parts of the day and they are usually in for the remainder of the evening after dinner time, sleeping on their dog beds in our master bed room with us.  I love my girls, but I can’t stand when they are dirty and taking over the house.  After a fun day at the lake the other day I was fed up and was ready to bathe them…problem was I didn’t have any dog shampoo. 

I did a little research and after reading a lot of pet blogs, pet health sites, and breeding sites, I came up with the following recipe for my own homemade dog shampoo.

1/2 a cup of distilled white vinegar, 1/2 a cup of clear antibacterial soap, 2 tablespoons of vitamin E oil.

I got all of these items for super cheap at my local grocery store.  I paid only a dollar each for the handsoaps, two dollars for a large container of vinegar, and two dollars for the vitamin E oil.  This was enough to make 6+ containers of dog shampoo which is super duper cheap!

I chose the Dial soap because it claims to have a “mild, neutral pH formula that is gentle to hands”.  I picked up three varieties to try.  1) Dial with Aloe, 2) Dial with Vitman E, and 3) Ocean Scent Antibacterial.  Adding the vinegar helps clean the skin and the distilled white vinegar has a pH of about 2.4 which is very low, so it helps to balance any high pH that may occur in the soap.  Eventhough I purchased soaps that had vitamin E and Aloe included, I was concerned about drying out the dog’s skin.  Pet Md also states that “Vitamin E is good for preventing those pesky age lines on your face, and it's also great for your dog's dry skin. You can give your pup a doggy massage by applying vitamin E oil directly to the skin, a soaking bath with vitamin E added to the water, or you can go all "Hollywood" and pop your dog a pill (of vitamin E, that is).”  This is why I added the vitamin E oil to my recipe.

I mixed my ingredients and added them to some containers I got for a $1.  I labeled each accordingly and was ready to try them out on the lake-smelling puparoos.

This soap lathers up great and you really only have to use a tiny amount at a time.  I probably could use one container to make about 15 – 20 baths.

There was a slight vinegar smell as you were washing the pups, but as soon as they dried you couldn’t smell it at all, only fresh and clean like soap.

Harley has a big patch of white fur (that is usually cream/red due to all her digging in the Georgia red clay) and this soap cleaned her white spot just as good as the shampoo we used that was specifically for white fur.

 

Once the pups were dry they smelled so clean and fresh.  Their fur was SUPER soft and they never did itch or scratch from the shampoo.  I think it is imperative that you rinse their coat REALLY well when you are finished scrubbing, and watch them carefully for any type of reaction.  I also would be extremely careful about using this on a pup with sensitive skin, but for our pups it was cheap, easy, fast, and worked wonders!