Smooth Coat Grooming

What a Smooth Coat is

A smooth coat is short hair lying flat against the body. There is nothing to cut and very little that can mat, which is why these breeds get described as wash and wear and why their owners are the least likely to ever book a groomer. That is mostly fair, and it is also why smooth coated animals are the ones that turn up with overgrown nails, sore ears and skin nobody has looked at properly in a year.

Beagles, Boxers, Vizslas, Dobermans, Staffordshire Bull Terriers, Dalmatians, Pugs and French Bulldogs carry one, as do Bengals, Siamese, Burmese and British Shorthairs.

The appointment is short. It is not nothing, and the reasons are not the ones people expect.

Clipping this coat

Rarely clipped because there is nothing to clip. A bath, a deshed and nail work is the whole appointment.

What a smooth coat appointment is actually for

Nobody books a Beagle for a haircut. What the appointment covers is everything a coated dog gets alongside the haircut and a smooth coated dog otherwise never gets.

Nails are the big one. A dog that walks on grass rather than pavement does not wear them down, and overgrown nails change how the foot loads, splay the toes and eventually alter the gait and load the joints. They also grow a longer blood supply the longer they are left, which means getting them back to a correct length takes several sessions rather than one. This is the most common thing found on a smooth coated dog that has never been to a groomer.

Ears are next, particularly on drop eared breeds like Beagles and Cockers where air does not circulate. Then anal glands, which are checked and expressed if needed. Then the skin itself, and a groomer with their hands over every inch of an animal every few months finds lumps, hot spots, fleas and ticks earlier than anybody else will.

A bath, a deshed, nails, ears and a look over is a sensible few times a year for a short coated animal. It is quick and it is the cheapest appointment in the book.

Some smooth coats have an undercoat, and it changes the advice

Smooth describes what the coat looks like, not how it is built, and several popular short coated breeds are genuinely double coated underneath.

Labradors are the clearest example: the coat is short, dense, slightly oily and water resistant, and there is a full soft undercoat under it that blows twice a year like any northern breed. Beagles, Pugs, Corgis and Rottweilers are the same. British Shorthair cats carry a famously dense plush undercoat under a very short top coat.

The practical difference is that these breeds benefit from an undercoat rake and a proper deshedding bath rather than only a rubber curry, and their shedding arrives in bursts rather than evenly. It also means the rule about never clipping a double coat quietly applies to a Labrador, which surprises people, though there is rarely any reason to clip one in the first place.

A true single coated smooth breed, a Boxer, a Vizsla, a Doberman, a Greyhound or a Siamese, has none of this. It sheds steadily, needs almost no tool at all, and feels the cold, which is why those are the breeds you see in coats in winter.