How to Groom & Brush a Dog's Head & Face

Video Transcript

" Hi! I am Anne-Marie for Expert Village and today we are learning basic dog grooming. In this series we are going to learn about brushing and combing your dog before bathing it. If you take a dog with knots and put it in the tub even middle knots, they are going to become much worse and much more intense and more painful for the dog to de-mat. So it is very important if you have the dog with any long hair that you comb out and brush out the hair before bathing the dog. I like to start with the head and work back to the tail just to make sure that I don’t forget to do any areas. This is Goony he is a Portuguese water dog, so he has a beard. When you have a dog with a beard it is really important because a lot of times when they eat their dinner or chew a bone some of it stays in the beard. You want to make sure, first you take a slicker brush and you brush out both sides of the beard, that the cheeks doing well and the underneath part and lift up the ear little and get near behind the ears after knotting. Then double check and make sure we got all of the knots. We will take a metal comb. Goony gets groomed a lot, so he does not really have too many knots. It is important with a long haired dog to have a tool like this a mat sweater. These are very sharp little individual razor blades with flat end flat on the back and sharp edges on the front. So if you take a dog say he had a knot here, we would want to get the flat part against his face and the sharp part facing the north and then you can work it through like that. If the knots is very big, you may just want to take a small area at a time may be lifting some of the hair up and just pulling a small area out at a time. Fortunately Goony does not have any knots. "