Experiment #14 : Grooming the Dog

Eddie's back.

This time, he needs to be groomed. His fur has gotten a bit unruly.

Look at all that fluffy fur.

His fur grows quickly, and he has to get it cut about once every four weeks. Professional grooming can become pretty pricey though, and I want to try to keep that cost low by at least maintaining his cut myself between professional grooming trips, which cost about $50. If we take him to get him groomed monthly, we're looking at $600 a year. I would rather save that money.

I've read a number of sites about how to give a poodle a puppy cut. Here's one: Poodle Puppy Cut

The only way to save the money is to buy some scissors and clippers and groom him myself, which I have done twice now. I've taken him once for professional grooming, because they're are some grooming jobs I just don't want to do.

It's time to do it myself again, though. Eddie's started to look, as Mike says, "like a pillow with legs." So, Mike and I are getting out the treats, scissors, and clippers again. He'll be assisting me for this one. Here we go...

I Get Started: 

Sometimes, I decide that something needs to get done and I just start the task, whether or not it's a good idea. In this case, I saw an opening (a tired dog) and grabbed the grooming scissors and started trimming his face and neck. Normally we bathe Eddie first! Mike asked what I was doing, and I suddenly realized I had jumped the gun. We don't wash his face anyway, though, so I went ahead and finished up. 

We temporarily had a dog with a disproportionate head and body. It was rather funny. 

Eddie, head grooming started, body not at all 

Tiny head, fluffy body

Actual Step One: Give dog bath

We are lucky. Eddie doesn't mind baths until he's absolutely drenched. He got in the bath tub and started playing with the water. And drinking it. Gross. But we'll move past that. Poodles have somewhat water resistant coats, which means we needed a lot of water.

Once we do manage to get his coat completely wet, he begins to make sad puppy eyes at us.
"What did I ever do to deserve this act of betrayal?" he asks with his sad puppy eyes.

In case you are wondering what such a fluffy dog looks like wet, here you go.

Both of these photos are from an earlier bath, but you
can get the idea from them

A few brief notes

We sometimes divide grooming over several days because of how difficult a task it is to keep Eddie focused. 

Also, Eddie's somewhat afraid of hair dryers, vacuums, and their near noisy electronic relative, clippers. Thus, we will be using them this time, but only in that we will turn it on and put them near him so that he can start to get used to the idea. We won't actually do any trimming with the clippers. We had to do this with the scissors the first time as well (only in this case it was because he was so convinced they were the most interesting toy he had ever seen).  

Step Two: Let dog dry, and make dog tired

An energetic dog is a dog that thinks the scissors are toys.

Okay, a tired dog is also this way, unless he's asleep or nearly asleep. Anyway, we get him to play to burn some energy, and when he calms down we're ready to start.

Step Three: Start Trimming

A key requirement here is to have two people. Mike's job is to give Eddie treats (kibble, in our case) and to make sure that he finds the kibble to more interesting than the scissors. Easier said than done, as Eddie seems to think the scissors are a toy gift from heaven.

Mike gives Eddie kibble, distracts him, and I start trimming. I grab bits of Eddie's coat, pull it up, and try to cut off a uniform amount. That's difficult on a wiggling, squirming, moving dog.

Fortunately the kibble keeps him mostly in one place for long enough for me to cut large sections of his coat without him moving too much. Mike has to position where he's holding the treats every so often so that I can get to all of Eddie's coat.

Another unfortunate part? We don't have a good place to groom him, so we do this all sitting on the floor. I have to hold onto the fur that comes off and put it in a pile up high because Eddie has an unfortunate habit of trying to eat his own fur. Really he has an unfortunate habit of trying to eat everything, which makes this slightly less strange. Maybe.

It's hardest to trim his face well. I have special face scissors with a super rounded tip for his face.

Eddie is now shaped like a dog again, rather than like a pillow. 

We discover as we go that Eddie's apricot colored coat, which had gotten lighter, has gotten darker again underneath. His legs stay light, though.

Step Four: Paws

Poodles sometimes have their paws shaved. Mike and I prefer to keep Eddie's paws short for several reason.

1) Short fur on paws = no matted fur on paws

2) The fur grows over his little foot pads, which makes him slip

3) It is very difficult to trim his nails when he has long fur on his paws

The task of keeping this fur short falls to me, and Eddie is still afraid of the clippers so I have to do it with scissors.

I wait until Eddie is almost asleep or actually asleep, and then I strike! He's quite willing to let us hold his paws, so the problem is when he decides to try to play with the scissors.
I have to very carefully trim the fur on top of his little feet and between his toes. When he's finished, it looks like he has on little socks.

I'm still working on getting each of his feet done. I try to do it by myself every time, and every time I end up having to wait until Mike gets home.

What does this take?

Courage, patience, and a second person. I'm all for the savings. We're currently planning to take Eddie in for professional grooming every 3rd month. There's some grooming tasks I just don't want to do. We'll cover it the other two times. That's $400 dollars a year we aren't spending.

I think we end up spending a total of about 1.5 hours on this each month between bathing, cutting, and other grooming requirements. The squirmy puppy is the biggest challenge, but having Mike around to distract him with treats makes the whole process a lot easier. We have to be careful not to give him too many treats at once, though.

I suspect we could train him to stand still soon. We're still working on "stay" under normal conditions, so I'm not sure that we're quite there yet.

He looks a little ragged, but so far all reviews have been positive from people who like the ragged look. He pulls it off well. I think it helps that he looks like a teddy bear no matter what we do to him!

We'll continue this for sure. I get a little better at it every time.