Brushing Your Dog at Home, Properly

A slicker brush — the flat rectangle of fine bent wires — is the workhorse for medium and long coats and for lifting a double coat while drying. An undercoat rake, with a single row of long widely spaced teeth, is what actually pulls dead undercoat out of Goldens, Shepherds, Huskies and Poms; a slicker skims over it.

A rubber curry brush or a grooming mitt is the right choice for short single coats — Labradors, Pugs, Beagles, Boxers, Indies. It lifts loose hair and massages the skin, and it is the only brush many short-coated dogs will ever need.

The most important tool is not a brush at all. A metal comb, the kind with wide teeth at one end and fine at the other, is how you check your own work. Buy one even if you buy nothing else.

The bladed de-shedding tools sold everywhere do work, and they are easy to overuse. The blade cuts as much as it pulls, and dragging one repeatedly over the same area shortens and thins the guard hairs, leaving a coat that looks moth-eaten and loses its weather-shedding quality.

Use one sparingly during heavy shedding — a few light passes over the back and flanks, then stop and switch to a rake and comb. Never use one on a mat, never press hard, and never use one on a thin or single-coated dog.

The same caution applies to slickers used with force. The fine wires can scrape the skin into a raw patch, which groomers call slicker burn. The brush should be held loosely and flicked, not pressed and dragged.

This is the technique that separates an actually brushed dog from a superficially brushed one, and it is easy to learn. Start at the bottom of one side, near the belly or the back leg. Part the coat with your free hand so you can see a horizontal line of skin. Brush only the hair below that parting, downward and outward, from the skin to the tip.

When that line is clear, move your parting hand up a couple of centimetres and repeat. You work up the body in horizontal lines until you reach the spine, then do the other side, then the legs, chest, tail and finally the head and ears. On a long-coated dog it takes fifteen to twenty minutes. On a short coat you will not need it at all.

It feels slow the first three times and then becomes automatic. The pay-off is that mats never get started, because you are physically touching every centimetre of skin on the dog on a regular basis.

Here is how you know whether you are done. Take the metal comb and try to pass it from the skin outward through the coat, in several places: behind each ear, the armpits, the chest, the back of the thighs, either side of the tail base. If it moves freely everywhere, the coat is brushed.

If it stops, snags or will not go in at all, there is a mat at that spot regardless of how good the coat looks. This test is the reason we recommend a comb over anything else — brushes give false positives constantly, gliding beautifully over the top of a felted underlayer.

Run the test at the end of every brushing session. It takes thirty seconds and it converts brushing from a hopeful activity into one where you actually know the outcome.

Frequency beats duration by a wide margin. Five minutes every day does far more than forty minutes once a week, because mats take days to form and a daily pass catches them as tangles. For continuously growing coats — Shih Tzu, Poodle, Maltese, Lhasa — daily is the honest answer.

Double coats need two or three sessions a week normally, and daily during a coat blow, when a Golden or a Husky can fill a bin in a week. Short single coats need a rubber brush once or twice a week, and that is genuinely enough; brushing a Labrador daily does no harm but is not necessary.

Brush before a bath, never after a knot has been through water. And brush while drying — lifting the coat as air goes through it both speeds the dry and finishes the brush-out in one pass.

Work in an order that goes from easy to difficult: shoulders and back first, then sides, then the belly and armpits, then legs, then head, ears and tail. Feet and face last, always. If the dog gets restless, stop while it is still going well rather than at the point of protest.

Keep sessions short at first, even sixty seconds, and end them yourself instead of letting the dog end them by walking off. A dog that learns brushing ends when it wriggles will wriggle every time.

If your dog hates the brush specifically, put a hand on the coat and use the brush in the other hand slowly in the same place, so the touch is predictable. A dog that has never been brushed, or that has been hurt by dematting in the past, needs a fortnight of very short sessions before you attempt a full brush-out — and if the coat is already matted, get the mats dealt with first so that brushing does not hurt.