Mani - pedi time!

 Have you ever seen a dog with hugely overgrown nails?  It's unhealthy for many reasons and is usually uncomfortable or even painful for the dog.

Keeping your dog's nails short is extremely important.  But for many owners the task of cutting cutting their dog's nails is stressful and they don't do it.  It doesn't need to be hard on you or your dog!

Sundays are the days we cut their nails - yes, every Sunday!  If you make it a weekly task, you dog gets used to it AND - for 2 dogs - it takes less than 10 minutes TOTAL!

Check this out, we have been doing Sisko's nails since he was a puppy and he is 7 years old and here is a picture of his foot today:

Looks great, right?

First you should know that dog's instinctively don't like their feet, tails or ears handled.  So when they are puppies, you should touch those places ALL THE TIME.

Today we cut Booker's nails for the first time.  We use a dremel to do the nails usually but Booker is too small so we used regular clippers.

 Click above to buy.

Because this was the first time, I had Marc help me.  We waited until Booker was tired and ready to nap.  Marc held his legs as I clipped.  As expected, he kicked and resisted the first foot and it took a bit.  But with persistence we did all 4 feet and by the 4th foot, he calmly laid there.  By doing this every week it will just be a normal routine.

Once his nails are a little bigger and tougher, we will use a dremel.  You can buy fancy dog nail specific grinders or just buy a regular dremel which we then use for other things. 

The most important thing to remember with a dremel is it gets hot quickly.  So you want to hold it on the nail only for a couple seconds.  I make 2 or 3 passes on each nail to not take a chance of it getting hot and causing pain.  You want this to be a positive experience!

The nice thing about the dremel is it gives a nice smooth rounded surface.

As soon as the nails are done, we give the dogs some treats!  Again, this helps them associate the experience with something positive!