How to Groom a Show Dog

How to Groom a Show Dog
Hi, this is Elise from Expert Village.com. In this short video clip we are going to be talking about dog grooming. We’ve talked about ready the utensils we use for grooming. We have also talked about getting the dog used to be up and comfortable on a table. So we have Tai on the table here and I am going to take your basic pen brush and I am just going to start working on him. I am just taking the brush through his coat and I am trying not to pull very hard. Tai is a coated breed and it is important to keep his coat fairly intact. If you get to an area where you feel he might have a matte, then getting some thing like a wide spaced slicker brush is a good idea to go in there. And again, you are not pulling on any of the hair but very gently working the comb through the coat. When you get an area well worked out, you can take the grooming rake and just bring it from the top of the hairline and pulling it down. You can see that it is not meeting any obstruction and so it got all the tangles out. What also is going to happen here if there is any undercoat that hasn’t come out in the brushing, it is going to come out if you can see in the rake. For doing hard to reach places like in between the toes you want to get a small slicker brush like this. So the areas in between the toes, if we can put Tai’s feet forward a little bit, you can take the slicker brush and very gently separate that hair out. When you are working on a matt you don’t want to just take a comb and pull it through, you want to take the matt and just gently separate it. The process is a little bit longer but it is much less painful for the dog and it saves much more of the coat. In a coated breed, when you are going to be going in the show ring, you really want that dog to have as much coat as possible. You can see how important it is to have the dog be comfortable standing, lying down or sitting on the grooming table so that is really going to be your first order of business in starting to get your dog prepared for grooming for the show ring.