We're hearing of lots of new additions to families during the lockdown...how exciting!!! Some of these little beauties are going to require professional dog grooming, so I thought I would put together a step by step process for you. I cannot emphasise enough how valuable it is to dog, owner and groomer starting professional grooming as early as possible (lockdown permitting *sigh*). The dog grooming salon can be rather overwhelming for a puppy; there are strange people, large, scary looking, noisy equipment and ALOT of new, strange smells, as well as being restrained on a high surface and being handled in ways that they perhaps haven't experienced before. That is why, the earlier and more regular you can have puppy grooms the better!
At Hashtag Dog, our puppy grooms, include bathing, drying, full brush through, hygiene trims, pads trimmed, feet scissored, face trim, ears cleaned and nails trimmed. We use positive re-enforcement in the form of tasty treats during the process and we take things at the puppy's pace, using the dryers on the lowest setting to begin with. If we feel they need a small break, we let them down on the floor in a secure area to calm down and investigate their surroundings.
The following infographic shows our process to introducing your puppy to professional dog grooming. In our experience, this has worked really well and we now have a lot of calm adult dogs that don't mind the grooming process at all :)
