Dog Coat Stages of Growth

Series Summary

Healthy, manicured nails; clean, trimmed hair; clear, smooth skin—these are what define a well-groomed dog. Dog grooming is the practice of caring for the appearance of a canine for personal or show purposes. Grooming routines include shampooing, hair clipping and cutting, nail clipping, powdering, hair styling, and teeth cleaning. These pet care practices are great for cutting down on shedding and dog odor, and will keep your dog’s body healthy. Grooming is also a great way to cut down on allergies and infection for both pets and their owners. Just like human hygiene practices keep us looking and smelling great, regular dog grooming helps Fido to put his best paw forward.

In this free pet grooming video, get instructions and tips on how to groom long-haired dogs. Grooming dogs with long hair is extremely difficult because these breeds are prone to matting and tangling. Using specially purposed grooming tools and techniques will allow pet owners to meet the needs of their dog. Learn about how a dog’s coat actually grows. Then get tips on how to trim the hair on specific parts of the dog’s body, including the feet, footpads, legs, torso, neck, head and face. Look for some especially helpful videos on how to deal with dog hair matting without ruining your dog’s healthy coat. You’ll leave him happy and active for years to come.

Video Transcript

"So to begin with the long coated dog, you're going to have different stages of coat. You start off with a fairly simple coat which is not going to be a problem to deal with which is your puppy coat. Your puppy coat will turn into an adolescent coat and as that coat change time when you're going from puppy to adolescent that you're going to start having some issues with your coat care. So we've got two changes, we've got puppy and adolescent and adolescent to adult and during those two coat changes is when you're going to be finding trouble keeping up with the coat with matts and undercoat issues. So those are the two times you want to pay attention to keep in mind. Probably for the first six months of the puppies life you're not going to have to worry too much about working on matts but you do want to worry about getting the dog used to being groomed. So think of it as having about a six to eight months play period where you're play grooming with your dog, getting them used to being brushed. This one right here actually has an adolescent coat. You can see that there's lots of coat and this is the adolescent stage. I can't wait till she gets through it and into her adult coat, but we'll be showing you some examples of adult coat as well. She has a nice texture to the outer coat and you can probably see some of the differences. This is a coarse or a thicker coat and then we've got the undercoat. So eventually she will loose this coat texture and she'll have her adult texture. This is a difficult trying time during this adolescent coat stage to work on the coat, but it is very important that you keep maintaining the coat, you keep working on it brushing it through and we'll talk about how to do that with the different coat stages."