Dog Grooming: The Tools & Techniques

Any dog owner will know that grooming your beloved pet is no easy task; in fact it can be the complete polar opposite. There is high chance that your dog won’t enjoy the grooming process, which can make the whole endeavour rather difficult. If you can’t make it to one of the fantastic facilities for dog grooming in North Wales, then there are a variety of measures that can be taken to make both your life and your dog’s life easier when maintaining a clean, healthy animal.

Preparation

Hopefully you have been maintaining the status quo with dog training since he or she was a puppy. In which case, they will understand the sit and stay commands that will become essential when the grooming process begins. Your dog will certainly try and vacate the bath tub as quickly as possible, but with a stern sit or stay command, they will soon learn that they must stay put. Another part of the preparation process is to make sure your dogs hair has been brushed before they go anywhere near the bath tub. This will make give their coat an additional shine after shampoo and conditioner has been applied.

Tools

Where hair clippers are concerned, you certainly get what you pay for. It will benefit you to invest in some higher quality clippers rather than finding the cheapest pair available. Also, search for clippers that come with interchangeable blades of various lengths.

Hair brushes are an essential part of your dog grooming kit. Long haired dogs will benefit from a pin brush to remove any tangles or matting. A comb is handy for brushing the hair on your dogs face. Using a comb makes it far easier to brush around the eyes, nose, and mouth.

A hair dryer can be useful to dry your dog before you begin cutting or brushing, especially a longer haired dog who will take longer to dry off. If you use a hair dryer on your dog, remember to set it at a lower heat to remove the risk of burning your beloved animal.

Choose your shampoo and conditioner carefully. A large majority of dogs can be allergic to the chemicals used in various pet hair products. Go straight to the natural, hypoallergenic products. Conditioning your dogs coat will make it easier to brush and drying time will be substantially reduced.

Asking another person to help may not seem like an obvious tool, but their assistance can be a distinct advantage during the entire grooming process. For the more intimate parts of grooming, this helping hand can distract the dog and hold them, keeping them calm and relaxed whilst you continue grooming.

Be Patient

Take your time and be patient with your dog. This is a stressful situation for them and will more than likely take a long time. But with preparation and the right tools for the job, the time it takes to groom your beloved pet will be significantly reduced. It is not worth risking cutting or injuring your dog just to get things over quicker.

Dog Training : Can You Teach an Old Dog New Tricks?

“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks”, or so the saying goes. When it comes to correcting negative and problematic behaviours with dog training, it’s very easy for an owner to consider their dog a little too long in the tooth to turn over a new leaf when trained, but that isn’t really the case at all. Make no mistake, dogs are very much like humans, and of course the younger the dog, the more impressionable he or she is.

Training a younger dog is much easier than training an older one that may be set in his or her ways. However - letting a dog get away with problematic behaviours, no matter the age, is entirely unacceptable. Older dogs can be trained, and should never be considered untrainable.

An owner resigning themselves to put up with poor behaviour based upon a dog’s age is just wrong – and often stems from laziness from the dog trainer’s part and a lack of understanding on the owners’ part. There are very many dog training providers throughout the UK, but it pays to go to one that will train older dogs – as after all, there’s no button on a dog which reverses time and lets you give another method a try.

Any good dog trainer or dog training school within the UK will have a psychological approach to dog training, and they will be able to get inside your dog’s head in order to provide solid reasons of which a dog behaves the way he or she does. Only with the reasoning a dog trainer can provide comes the understanding of a dog’s behaviour, and what follows is the ability to make proper change.

Without the reasoning and the understanding a dog training school can provide, change is absolutely impossible, and you’re at square one – reduced to yelling at your dog, getting frustrated, and wishing that you’d never have purchased him or her in the first place. Choose dog training which is centered towards you as an owner as well as covering the training and the psychology of your dog, and you’ll not go far wrong.