Groomer sends pet hair to Gulf

An Anderson pet groomer is sending a byproduct from her business to the Gulf Coast to aid the oil spill cleanup efforts.

Debra Pruett, owner of All Breed Paw Prints Mobile Grooming, has sent three shipments of pet hair to Excess Access, which is collecting animal and human hair to use in making booms to soak up oil in the wake of an April 20 explosion at the Deepwater Horizon rig which killed 11 workers and has resulted in thousands of gallons of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico each day.

“You have to join the Web site and once you do, they send you the addresses of where to send your pet and human hair,” she said. “I’ve made shipments to New Orleans and to Florida.”

The hair is stuffed into “booms” made of nylon stockings and covered in mesh. The booms are then placed down to absorb oil on beaches and swampland.

“The hazmat people then collect the booms and do what they do with it, usually incinerate it,” she said. “Currently, getting your pet groomed is very ‘green,’ because it can actually help the environment.”

For many years, Pruett said, pet hair was considered a waste product and it is very hard to dispose of.

“If you compost it, it takes a long time to break down,” she said. “One of my clients with a kennel said he burned his, and after four days, the pile was still smoldering.

“Birds like it for nests, but it clogs up septic tanks and municipal water systems. This [oil spill effort] is a nice way of fixing the problem.”

Pruett has sent a total of 42 ½ pounds of pet hair to the effort so far, most of which came from a kennel in Carthage and another here in Neosho. Pruett has been doing pet grooming for 27 years and began having a mobile pet grooming business in 2000.

“I literally started with equipment set up under a tree, and then went to a tent and then to a box trailer,” she said. “My husband, Billy Thornton, and I built the trailer into a mobile unit. I guess we’re an American success story.”

She learned pet grooming while her husband, a retired trucker, was in the military in the Boston, Mass., area, and said grooming helped the couple raise six children. She’s done pet grooming in New York, New Orleans, and Mississippi as well.

“With pet grooming, you can get a job just about anywhere in the world,” she said. “Everybody has pets. I got into grooming to pay for my show dog habit. My oldest daughter is in her 30s now, and she doesn’t remember me not doing it.”

Pruett has several standard poodles, which she occasionally dyes different colors, and her husband has a white and brown dachshund known as a piebald.

She said she will travel to kennels and residences within an 80-mile radius of Anderson for the mobile grooming business.

“I’m the only mobile in Southwest Missouri, Northeast Oklahoma, Southeast Kansas and Northwest Arkansas area,” she said. “I’ve gotten calls from as far away as Branson, but no, I don’t go there. They found me on the Internet.”

In other parts of the country, she said, mobile pet groomers are “a dime a dozen,” but she is the only one she knows of in this area.

“Here, it’s a new concept,” she said, “even though it’s been around for at least 15 years.”