Being a mother helps me understand my canine friends better as I often compare my dogs' behaviors to those of my toddlers. Many dogs are very gracious with the whole grooming process and most often come to enjoy it. However, the learning process takes many grooming sessions as the dog learns that it will not get hurt and the strange noises are not threatening. My son, now almost 4, is just getting used to having his haircut with the clippers and when I encounter a dog that struggles during grooming, I remember how my son wiggled and giggled for the first 3 years of his life while we tried to cut his hair.
Diamond and Nails
The beautiful pooch above is our dog, Diamond, a pit bull mix we rescued from the South Bronx. Dogs with Diamond's coat such as the Boxers, Bulldogs, Vizla, etc. require a good bath every few weeks and a good brushing using a rubber curry, hound glove or bristle glove to make the coat shine and remove dead hair. As she was rescued when she was almost a year old, she was not intruduced early enough to having her nails trimmed. This allowed the quicks (the veins that run inside dogs' nails) to grow very long and makes it impossible to trim her nails short eventhough we do cut her nails every two weeks.
Nail trimming is a simple task in theory but a difficult skill to master in practice. My preferred method is to bend the foot back so that the whole foot is pointing down. This allows me to position myself behind the dog and see where the nails are in relation to the pads. On dogs with dark nails, I trim the nail so it is leveled with the pad. Looking at the inside of the nail, I then trim small slices off until I see a black dot emerge in the middle.
Quicking a nail means cutting into the quick causing bleeding. This happens to the most experienced groomer and the pain is believed to be like a paper cut. We always have styptic powder on hand to stop the bleeding and numb the pain.
As groomers, we often see dogs with overgrown nails, at times digging right into their pads. This makes it very difficult to fit clippers between the nail and the pad during clipping and puts the dog at increased risk for bleeding.
