How to Clip a Dog's Nails

Healthy skin, hair, nails and teeth are what define a well-groomed dog. Dog grooming is the practice of caring for the appearance of a canine for personal or showing purposes. Grooming rituals include washing, hair clipping and cutting, nail clipping, powdering, hair styling, and teeth cleaning. Grooming is important for your pet and is more than aesthetically pleasing to owners. It is great for cutting down on shedding and smell, but will keep your pet’s skin, hair, nails and teeth healthy. Grooming is also a great way to cut down on allergies and infection for both pets and their owners.

In this series of how to videos, you will learn more about the procedure of grooming your dog. Our expert will show you step-by-step the best way to groom your dog, offer tips on the equipment necessary for grooming dogs, including recommendations for brushes, combs, shampoos, conditioners, and clippers, as well as grooming tips for the sensitive areas such as ears, eyes, and paws.

This series is an Equilibrio Films production.

"Hi! I am Anne-Marie with Expert village and today we are learning basic dog grooming. In this series, we are going to learn about the nail trim. You will need nail cutters and you need a reliable styptic powder, Quick Stop I think works the best. The nail cutters for cutting the nails, the Quick Stop is just in case you cut a little too far and the nail bleeds a little you need styptic powder to stop the bleeding. You want to be careful not to cut the quick. The quick is a vein that grows inside the nail and comes to the tip, what you are going to cut is the little extra nail that sticks on beyond the quick. It is very hard to tell with the black nail, whether or not you can see where the quick is. On a white nail you can actually see the end of quick. With a black nail I find it easiest to look from underneath. Goony here has a lot of dirt in his nails, but you can sort of see that the quick comes right there into underneath and there only a little bit nail sticking over. May be if we cut it you can see better. If you cut on an angle like this and we will see we did not make anything bleed. Goony gets his nails done very regularly. So we are not going to get out a whole of the nail off of Goony. When doing the nail trim always check the dog for a dewclaw. Some breeders will remove this claw at a young age. So that the dog will not have an extra toenail. Goony does not have a dewclaw. If he did we want to make sure we trim that nail too. Because if that nail gets too long often it will hook on things and pull and cause an injury to that toe, which is very painful. So the importance of keeping your dogs nails trimmed is to make sure that the nails don’t split and to make sure that the dog does not get his nails caught on anything. Now obviously we don’t want to cut Goony on the quick. But we will pretend as if we did and say we had cut the nail here and say it was bleeding. We will take a pinch of the Quick Stop and we would place it on the nail like that right where the blood was and then apply a little pressure from in it. That would instantly stop the bleeding and then you will be done."