Dog Grooming Supplies Part 2 – Brushing and Trimming

In this post, we’ll finish up the two-part series on dog grooming supplies by discussing after-bath grooming such as brushing and combing your dog and doing a bit of trimming.

After your dogs coat is thoroughly dry, you can begin to brush him. Never brush a wet dog as it is uncomfortable and even painful to them, and is not good for the dogs coat either.

Brushes and Combs

The brush is one of the dog pet supplies you won’t be able to do without.  Whether you have a short- or long-coated breed of dog, brushing helps evenly distribute oil throughout their coat, keeps them free of burs and mats, feels good to them, and can be very relaxing to you!

The type of brush you buy depends greatly on the breed of dog.  Short-coated breeds tend to have thinner skin and therefore need a gentler brush, possibly one made with plastic ball-tipped bristles or even a natural bristle brush.  A long-coated breed needs much more coat care than a simple brushing.  You first need to make sure you remove any of the undercoat that is being shed.  The number one best product I’ve found for this is called the DeShedderTool.  I have one for my Saint Bernard and in the spring and fall, the amount of undercoat I can get off of him in one 15-minute sitting is almost unbelievable!

It’s important to get this undercoat off as if it’s left on, it will create serious matting that will cause your dog discomfort and even pain.

Once you’ve removed the undercoat layer, you can go over the dog with a slicker brush with soft wire bristles.  This is excellent for getting the outer layers of shed hair off.  Be careful of using a slicker brush for too long in one sitting because even though the wire bristles are soft, they do tend to become irritating after awhile.

You may choose to go over your dog with a comb, but many find this step unneccesary.  It really depends on you, your dog, and how tolerant they’ll be at this point, after all that brushing!  This is one of the dog grooming supplies you can probably forego.

Finally, get yourself a pair of blunt-pointed scissors to use to trim the internal ear hairs, hairs around the genitals, in between the pads of the feed or behind the ears.  These last three are places that are prone to matting so keeping those hairs trimmed will be worth it in the long run.  You can purchase these in the dog grooming supplies part of a pet store or even use kiddie scissors for this.

I hope this two-part series on dog grooming supplies has helped to shed some light on the necessities of grooming a dog.  I feel it’s best to keep it simple!