Comb in the Country Dog Grooming

A short clip of Sandy smashing it in the bath 🥰 The amazing thing about how I work with your dogs in the salon is that they build enough confidence to want to take part. Sandy chose to get in the bath, chose to stay and only left when I asked. No restraints needed. No worries. No wrestling her into the bath. Cooperation and trust. Here we are practising putting water onto her coat (this is how we will be putting shampoo on her). She is a little worried about other methods so water on a scrunchie is what we are working with 😊

Milo is king of being pampered and massaged 👑 He loves a massage and a fuss. Just not so keen on the water part of grooming at the moment. So we practised things to help with the bath (minus getting wet), using the dryers, some foot and nail handling and started some muzzle training (which he got the hang of super quickly). We've just got to build his confidence back up to being able to get him wet again 😊

Mr.Milo, despite being in a little training slump, did super well today 😊 We have to remember that progress isn't linear when we are working on things with our dogs. There will be times when our dogs get stuck with their training. We just need to keep things positive and make things a little easier to help them through it. Milo currently doesn't like staying in the bath, even though he had good duration before. So I reward him for simply going in and out of the bath and we just work on other bits that he is more comfortable with instead.

Had a short gap between appointments so I thought the Chaos Goblin could come and work on a few bits. This is Ty. He is both enthusiastic and easily frustrated, but it makes for some fun and chaotic training sessions.

Normally Muzzle Monday is for sharing photos of muzzled doggos living their best life, but today's Muzzle Monday is for Eddy 🖤 Eddy's muzzle was a no touch zone 🚫 But after only a small number of sessions we've built up trust and some skills to help Eddy feel more comfortable about it all. In this clip he still displays some body language to communicate that he is uncomfortable but he knows that he doesn't have to escalate these behaviours to make me listen. He also had the option to leave the area if he wanted to. There are no restraints keeping him in this spot. He opted in and allowed me to carefully and gently groom his muzzle. I feel honoured that Eddy trusts me and let's me work on areas he is particularly sensitive about. I am also super excited about his progress in the salon 🥰 Grooming his muzzle was such a big win for us.

What you see is what you get: the only thing I edit out of my photos are your dogs tag details 📸😊 A little behind the scenes photo edit post today to show you the before and afters. I only do a little lighting and colour adjustment on my photos of your dogs and that's only because my phone camera can't see them as beautifully as I do 🥰 I capture 'in the moment' photos, or a cooperative pose with a tasty treat ready to reward them with. There are no forced poses and no restraints used. I will never make your dog uncomfortable for social media nonsense, be it photos, videos or reels. Your dogs are worth more to me than a few digital 'likes' ❤️

Pica did so well today 🥰 She's not fully relaxed but becomes more comfortable with each session we do. You can see here that she has lovely relaxed ears and is focused on both her guardian and myself 😊 As she is happy to come closer to me now, we introduced her touching a target stick that I was holding today and tried some other games too. Enjoy this clip where I make some weird noises 😆

Hello wonderful people 🥰 I have a polite request for this drizzly Sunday: If you value what I do, please consider leaving me a review ❤️ Reviews help others when they are looking for a new dog groomer and are super helpful for a small business like myself. I love working with all of your dogs, figuring out their favourite games and how they like to be groomed. With how happy all of your dogs are to come back, I'd like to think that they love me too 😆🥰 So, if you happen to have a few minutes spare, please leave a review. You can also find me on Google and can leave a review there too if you fancy it. Here's a clip Eddy's human got of Eddy and me working together to groom down his legs (a tricky spot for Eddy). I need to get some more clips of Eddy and me because he is incredible with consent-based grooming.

We all know how awesome dogs noses are. They can find lost people, detect cancers, sniff out traces of a single ingredient within a whole meal, find bedbugs etc etc. Their noses are simply incredible. Because of this, I aim to always use shampoos with subtle or no scents in the salon and shampoos which have more natural ingredients. I also don't use any perfumes on your dogs because, to be honest, most of them are too strong for my own nose, let alone our dogs noses. In this video you can watch Ty find a rock that I only had in my hand for a few seconds, which I then threw into all of the other rocks at the beach for him to find. Yes, he brings back the same rock. No, I did not teach him to do this. We randomly noticed that he did this one day while we were throwing rocks for him to chase, so we tried it again. It's now one of his favourite games to play at the beach. He doesn't find the rock all the time, but it's a pretty tricky game so that's okay. There are so many scent games you can play with your dogs to get their brains working as well as sports such as scent work and mantrailing. Try some and see how awesome their noses are. You may find yours and your dogs new favourite game 😊

A little clip of Ada after she learnt that getting in and out of the bath is actually quite a lot of fun 🥰 To start, she would only follow a trail of cheese in and out of the bath. Within 15 minutes she was getting in and out with a hand signal paired with a vocal cue and was quite speedy! We also worked around the hairdryer and the buzzy clippers to give her a little confidence boost.

A short clip from a super successful session with Pica 🎉 This may not look like much to most, but for Pica, walking next to a stranger is a big deal. We started off with a lot of distance, slowly got closer and closer, then did some wonderful parallel walking together around the field. Today both myself and Picas guardian could talk to each other without Pica becoming worried and barking and she made it through the whole 30 minute session (last time Pica ended the session 10 minutes early by going back to the car). These are just some extra steps we're doing to help Pica feel comfortable with me. We need to make sure she's confident that I'm not a scary person before trying to bring her into the salon (an enclosed space) in order for us to succeed 😊 She is doing amazingly 🥰

A really important thing for me is being able to adapt each session to a dogs' individual needs. I saw Pica again for her first session after her Meet and Greet and we met at the local field. Pica is quite fearful of people. Making her session with me a positive one meant I needed to give her lots of space and we slowly worked on closing the gap between us. Pica worked beautifully with her person, there is such a strong bond there, and we managed to get so close to each other. In this clip you can see she even lets out a lovely loose wag as they walk to the half-way mark towards me which is amazing. Our current aim before tackling the salon or any grooming is to slowly and positively introduce her to me. Pica is a dog who is small enough to be forced into the salon with me with the door closed promptly behind. We could absolutely do that. But Pica would not feel safe and she would not be able to learn how to trust me if she was forced into that position. Trust is a huge thing when it comes to holistic and force free grooming. This is something we need to get right. With Pica, this means slow introductions outside, where she has space to escape if she becomes too worried.