Regular grooming is vital for your dog’s comfort and welfare, as well as being an enjoyable way to build up a strong bond between you and your dog. It will also help ensure your dog is happy and comfortable being handled by others, including your vet.
Apart from having the smartest looking dog in town, grooming your dog regularly provides multiple benefits to both you and your dog. Firstly, it enhances the relationship between you and your dog. It keeps the coat healthy with natural oils, mat-free and promotes new hair growth. It also allows you to check your dog for any abnormalities or skin problems that may otherwise be missed. And most importantly, it means less of your dog’s fur on the carpet and your new trousers!
If you detect any irregularities during your dog’s grooming sessions or your professional dog groomer has raised any concerns, please raise this with your vet.
There are many grooming aids on the market. However, for most dog breeds a metal comb, bristle brush and finishing cloth will be sufficient to groom a dog. Before using any equipment, make sure it’s all clean and in good working order without broken teeth or rusty areas that could cause damage or pain to your dog.

Throughout a dog’s lifetime, they will require regular grooming so dog owners should try to introduce a grooming regime at the earliest opportunity, ideally as a puppy.
By slowly familiarising your dog to grooming equipment, this will not only improve their welfare but also make it easier for you and them in the future when they may need to be handled by a vet.
Grooming sessions should be a relaxing and enjoyable experience for your dog. It’s important to ensure that you’re always assessing your dog’s body language for signs they may be uncomfortable or avoiding being touched.
When choosing an area to groom your dog, ensure it’s non-slip, dry and stable - a place where you can keep your dog calm and where you will feel comfortable and secure. If grooming a young dog, keep the sessions short and fun so your dog considers it a pleasurable experience and doesn’t get bored.
Before starting the grooming process, we recommend doing some physical checks on your dog to help monitor their health. First, make sure your dog is calm and willing to take part.
Our grooming tips and sequence for how to groom your dog at home is as follows:
Having short nails contributes to your dog’s overall wellbeing. Excessively long are more prone to breaking at the blood vessels causing bleeding and can also affect your dog’s gait (how they walk). If your dog regularly walks on hard surfaces like the pavement, they may not need their nails trimmed regularly. One indication a dog’s nails need trimming is whether their nails touch the ground when standing straight. You can also listen for the sound of their nails when they walk on a hard surface like a tiled or wooden floor; this may mean they’re too long.
Your vet can advise you on how often your dog’s nails need to be trimmed. We recommend trimming nails is best left to professionals. Your vet or professional dog groomer can do this for you.
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Here are a few tips for your dog’s bath time:
Guide Dogs is committed to the highest standards of dog welfare, operating on the knowledge that the welfare of our dogs is inseparable from the wellbeing of our service users. Our staff, volunteers, and service users, undergo comprehensive training in dog care and welfare, to ensure close adherence to our key welfare principles.
We create educational and informative content to share our 90-plus years’ worth of canine expertise. This content is periodically reviewed as we continue to embrace new knowledge and scientific insights to improve how we breed, raise, train, and partner our dogs.
Whilst Guide Dogs may be able to suggest various third-party websites and third-party products when pertaining to dog care, those are not endorsed by Guide Dogs. Guide Dogs has no control over those third parties and cannot be held responsible for the accuracy of information and support they can provide or the suitability and quality of any products or services they provide.