Hair mats and nylons

We get 3 newspapers and this past week all of them had stories about the use of pet hair to make hair mats for cleaning the oil spill on the gulf coast; when I read this I thought "Wow, what a great new idea!" It turns out that the idea has been around since just after the Exxon spill in Valdez in 1989. That's when hair stylist Phil McCrory from Alabama noticed photos of sea otters covered in oil showed clear water around them; he correctly concluded that the animal's hair had absorbed the oil and cleaned the water. He designed a hair mat which has been used in oil spills ever since and has spawned a non-profit called Matter of Trust in San Francisco. This organization collects donated pet fur clippings, human hair clippings, and nylon stockings from all over the world to make the re-usable "hair boom" written about last week.

Three weeks ago, just a few days before the oil spill, we clipped Eddy's coat.

It was a fairly long procedure made awkward by the fact that we don't have a grooming table. Ed sat on the kitchen counter while we worked on him. I bet we got close to a pound of clippings off of him. Too bad we didn't know about Matter of Trust, because a pound of hair is enough to make one hair mat, which can be wrung out and used dozens of times. Eddy could have helped clean up that awful oil spill.

We don't have any nylon stockings to donate either, but actually, come to think of it, who does? I know dozens of people with hairy dogs, but I can't think of anybody who wears nylons. How odd.