(light, bubbly music)
- Smoochy as you can see
is considerably larger than Hilda.
Smoochy is almost a year old,
and you can also see he has a lot of coat.
This is one hairy dude.
This fellow is constantly needing grooming attention.
Living on Vancouver Island means
we take our dogs to the beach a fair bit,
and we also go on a lot of trails.
So we run into ticks, we run into dirt,
and our dogs are always wanting to swim in the ocean.
It's one of the great advantages
of living on Vancouver Island that
you can go to the beach all the time,
but it can also mean a lot more work with your dudes.
So Smoochers is wiggly-piggly little fellow,
and he needs a lot of work to keep him focused.
So I usually tend to spend time grooming him
in between his appointments in the evenings.
Smoochers like to sit on my lap,
he loves to watch TV, he does get very focused on the TV,
he often talks to the TV, and so that's a really good
time for me to be able to get him to be quiet
and sort of still so we can do some grooming.
So because Smoochy-Patoochy is a stud,
he's fairly robust in his personality.
He is not the same as a companion dog,
in that he has a lot of hormones.
Especially at his teenage years,
so he's a little harder to handle.
So what we do here, and how it works for him,
will definitely be easier with your puppy at home.
And what we're going to do with Smoochy now
is about what you want to start doing
with your puppy at about the six month mark.
So you can spend a little bit longer with him,
same principles though, we have a toy
or a chew stick, or whatever it is
that they enjoy doing to distract them with,
some of our handy-dandy liver treats,
the same brush, the same comb,
and if we needed to we would use a towel.
Now one thing if you bath your puppy at home,
when you take them out of the bath,
don't take the towel and rub them like this
cause that tends to create mats.
You want to do more of a blotting type of action.
So Smoochers is clean, well relatively speaking
he's clean, he had a bath just about four days ago.
So he doesn't really need to be bathed.
So always you're going to start with the brush.
The brush is always your first line of defense.
So you're going to want to go over
his coat and I start like this
which really doesn't do anything much
in terms of actual maintenance,
but it gets him in the spirit of the thing.
He knows, oh yes we're going to do grooming.
Okay this is good.
And he likes it because it's like petting.
Now to actually manage his coat,
what you want to do is go down to the skin.
That's the trick.
If you don't go down to the skin,
then you are not getting actual mats out.
So we'll show you here on the side of him,
if he'll cooperate with us here.
So you want to start, and you're gonna start
at the tail if you're doing this
and then work your way up the body.
And you may want to do this over more than one sitting.
So you just want to separate the fur,
just like this, right down to where
you can see a good line.
Right down to the skin where you
can see the line of his skin.
And then you brush right out
in all directions, away from that line.
And you just do a little but at a time.
Then you move up a little bit farther
on his coat, then you do again.
Down, right down the line.
You see he's hiding his nose in my arm,
he quite enjoys doing that
and he did that all on his own,
but it also helps to keep him still.
Now we do this like I said, in the evenings,
it's great, he can look at Reynold besides me,
Reynolds can distract him, but primarily
what he does is look at TV.
So this is what you do just through his whole coat,
right up and down his whole body.
Now he's just like a puppy still
because he's still a teenager
and he's like oh, I need to have my treat!
I get a treat!
And he's got his treat, and he's happy with me again.
So I would separate his main body
into four sections, treat him after each time.
And then I would do his legs as a different section,
and then his head and his chest.
Now once you've done the area,
you take the comb and you put it through.
And see how it's moving?
As long as it's going through smoothly,
then you know you've got everything,
there's no mats and you're good to go.
And you're not going to have to use
the brush to any huge extent cause you can see,
I only did that very small area,
but I'm able to get the comb right the way
through him quite easily.
So he's in good condition that way.
So now when you get to his head,
now I'm sorry he has his back to you
but he's focused on me and that's what you want,
when you get to his head,
you don't use the brush on his head.
Just use the comb, just go up like that,
boof, boof, boof, easy-peasy.
And main thing you want to worry about
on the head area, as I mentioned
with Hilda, is under the ears.
This tends to mat and usually what we do
is we have our groomer shave down
under their ears so that that hair is shorter.
Same with under the bum in the fatty area.
And the trickiest part of all, which all dogs hate,
is having their face done.
And see he his already hiding from me
because he really doesn't want me to do it.
So we have to be a little bit gentler with him,
you can hold like this, one hand on the top of his nose,
one hand underneath, and then just ever so gently,
work through the area.
And again we don't do it for long periods
of time cause we don't want them to get mad at us,
we want them just to enjoy the experience.
So that's how you maintain a really full coat.