Grooming at Home
What to do between appointments, and what to leave alone
The Tools Worth Owning
Pet shops sell a great deal of grooming equipment and most owners need four things. Buying the four good ones costs less than the drawer of gadgets people end up with.
- A metal comb. The single most useful thing you can own, and the one most people do not have. It is what tells you whether the coat is actually clear, because a brush will happily glide over a felted layer and a comb will not.
- A slicker brush for the bulk of the work on a long or curly coat. It is for lifting and separating, not for checking.
- An undercoat rake if you have a double coated dog. A slicker barely touches what needs to come out.
- Nail clippers or a grinder, plus styptic powder in the same drawer, bought before you need it rather than after.
What is usually a waste: brushes sold on the promise of stopping shedding, anything with a blade marketed as a de shedding tool, and human hairbrushes. Scissors and thinning shears deserve their own warning further down.
Which of the four you actually need depends on the coat rather than the breed name.
Do Not Use Your Own Shampoo
This one is worth being specific about, because it is easy to assume shampoo is shampoo.
Human skin is acidic, sitting around pH 4.5 to 5.5. Dog skin is much closer to neutral, usually put at about 6.5 to 7.5. Products are formulated for the skin they are meant for, so washing a dog in yours pushes its skin barrier the wrong way.
The second half of it matters more. A dog's outermost layer of skin is only about three to five cells thick, where yours is ten to fifteen. Their skin is thinner and more permeable than ours to begin with, so it has less margin when the barrier is disrupted.
The visible result is flaking, dryness, itching and scratching, and skin that is easier for bacteria and yeast to get a hold on. Baby shampoo is not an exception, it is just a milder human product.
Use a plain dog shampoo, rinse for longer than feels necessary, and rinse again. Residue left in a coat is a common cause of itching that gets blamed on allergies.
Drying Is the Part People Get Wrong
A coat left to dry on its own is how a bath turns into a matting problem, particularly on anything curly or double coated. But the obvious fix causes its own trouble.
A human hair dryer is built around high heat and low airflow, which is exactly the wrong combination for a dog. The heat is higher than a dog's skin should meet, and because the airflow is weak the coat takes far longer to dry, so that heat sits on the skin for much longer. That is what causes burns, and it happens most easily where the coat is thin.
A salon dryer works the opposite way round: a lot of moving air and little or no heat, so the water is pushed out of the coat rather than baked out of it.
If a human dryer is what you have, use the cool setting or the lowest heat, hold it well back, and keep it moving constantly so it never rests on one patch. Towel first and take as much water out that way as you can.
Brush while you dry rather than after. A coat dried flat and then brushed is a coat you have to do twice.
Nails, and Finding the Quick
Inside every nail is the quick, which carries a blood vessel and a nerve. Cutting it hurts and it bleeds enthusiastically, and a dog that has had it done once remembers.
On pale nails you can see it as a pink line and stop short of it. On dark nails you cannot see anything, which is where most people give up.
The way through is to take very small amounts off and look at the cut face of the nail after each one. You will see a pale chalky center, and as you get close to the quick a small dark dot appears in the middle of it. That dot is the warning. Stop there.
A grinder is slower and much harder to go too far with, and many dogs mind it less than the pinch of clippers. Either way, keep styptic powder to hand, because catching a quick eventually happens to everybody and the fix is thirty seconds of pressure with the powder rather than a panic.
Little and often beats a monthly battle. The quick recedes as the nail is kept short, so nails that are already long take several sessions to bring back rather than one.
All of this is far easier on a dog whose feet have been handled since it was a puppy, which costs nothing to start and is close to impossible to add later.
Ears and Eyes
Ears are a weekly look rather than a weekly clean. Lift the flap, look, and smell. A healthy ear is pale and smells of nothing much.
Wipe only what you can see and reach with a cotton pad on your finger. Never push a cotton bud down the canal: a dog's ear canal turns a corner, so anything pushed straight in packs debris against the eardrum instead of removing it.
Redness, a yeasty or sour smell, dark waxy discharge, head shaking or scratching at one ear is a vet visit rather than a cleaning problem. Ear infections need treating, and cleaning an infected ear at home usually makes the dog sorer without fixing anything.
For eyes, wipe discharge away from the corner with a damp pad, using a fresh side for each eye. On a white coated dog the rusty staining under the eyes is caused by constant wetness, so keeping the area dry does more than any whitening product.
Jobs to Leave to a Groomer or a Vet
Knowing where to stop is most of doing this well at home.
- Anal glands. Squeezing these at home is easy to do badly and can cause real damage. If a dog is scooting or licking, that is a vet or an experienced groomer.
- Any mat that has reached the skin. There is a whole page on why, and the short version is that skin lifts into the mat and scissors find it.
- Shaving a double coat, which changes what grows back.
- Cutting anything off a cat. Cat skin is thinner again and moves more, and cats do not stay still for a correction.
- Thinning shears in inexperienced hands. They leave holes that take months to grow out, and the damage is not obvious until the coat is dry.
None of that is precious. It is the same reason you would not cut your own hair with the clippers set to one length and no mirror.
How Much of This You Actually Need to Do
The honest answer is that it depends entirely on the coat, and the gap between breeds is enormous. A smooth coated dog needs a rubber mitt once a week and nails kept short. A curly coated one needs combing through to the skin every day or two, and skipping it for a fortnight has consequences a smooth coated owner never meets.
Your breed guide carries the routine, the interval and the thing that most often goes wrong on that particular coat.
How Often to Groom
How often to book, and how to tell you have left it too long.
Find your interval →What It Costs
What a salon charges, and why keeping up at home is the cheapest thing you can do.
See typical prices →