How to Trim Your Puppy's Nails

Video Transcript

"Hi! I’m Melanie McLeroy with Taurus Training for Expert Village and today we’re going to talk about puppies. This little boxer puppy Indi and I are going to talk about trimming nails. It’s important that you desensitize your puppy at a young age to things that they’re going to having to deal with when they’re older having their ears handled, investigated, their feet messed with. When they go to the vet’s office to have their nails done, the vet often doesn’t have time to take the time that they need to, to get the puppy used to it. The first thing you can do is just start messing with their nails. Now, if you another person to help you with this, it’s really helpful because one person can mess with the nails and the another one feeds them a treat. Now, this puppy seems to be associating her nails being messed with by chewing on the yummy, yummy leash, but I’d rather she learned that when she has her nails messed with she gets a yummy treat. So, instead of just jumping in there and cutting off some nail, which can be very frightening and even painful, she’s learning that having her nails messed with gently means something good and yummy, good puppy, good girl. The next step is to introduce the clippers. Again, I don’t want to clip, I’m just going to mess with the nail a little bit, now I have a little tiny tip and I’m going to clip right when she gets the treat, no reaction. Now, if this pup didn’t go through these handling exercises her first nail trimming experience might be very scary. So, mess with the nail, starting to protest. I have a tiny, tiny little bit of the end clip and treat, good girl. If you can work with your puppy every single day look in her ears, brush her teeth. Boxers especially can get tartar build up, rub their tummies, mess with their feet, mess with their nails, massage their backs and you associate that with positive things then every trip to the vet and the groomer is going to be a piece of cake for you and for everyone involved. Good girl, little puppy."