NAILS.........GRRRR!

I have come to the conclusion that the only reason for dogs to be born with toes nails, is so that groomers can be tortured by them......both physically and mentally.

It starts with Grooming School.

You are petrified of hitting the quick, hurting the dog, and making the nail bleed.

Your teacher keeps telling you to take more off.

You keep taking itty, bitty pieces off the nails, until the teacher gets fed up with you and comes over, grabs those stupid guillotine nail clippers out of your hand and says; "Here. Let me show you again!" and proceeds to clip the nails with lightning speed, making you feel like an idiot.

Torture session number one.

You eventually become more comfortable with clipping the nails.

Of course, you learn very quickly that those nails can be a pain in your a** in different ways....literally.

Like, early on in my grooming career.

One summer to be exact.

I was wearing flip flops (open toes shoes) to work.

I was walking a very large Old English to the tub when he decided that he wanted to go back to his kennel.

He turned, stepped down on the top of my bare foot, and proceeded to dig all of his toes nails into my skin, and pushing with all of his might to go back to his kennel.

Talk about pain.

Lets just say, by the time I was able to get his foot off of the top of my foot, get feeling back into my foot, and saw the four holes in the top of my foot, I had learned my lesson to never ever wear open shoes in the grooming room again.

Oh, I used to wear ear rings also....until the day that a Shih-tzu put his paw up to my face as I was carrying him back to the grooming room and got one his nails caught in the loop of my earring.

Talk about some more pain.

I was able to get the nail out of the earring before he ripped the whole earring out of my earlobe, but I swear he did manage to pull the earring enough to make the hole larger.

I no longer wear earrings to work.

Of course, there are the countless number of times that a dog freaks out as I am taking them out of a kennel and they rake their nails across my neck, or arm, or face.

And, the times that they dig all of their back nails into your back as you carry them from the kennel, to the tub, to your table.

Lets not forget the times that the dog hangs on you in the tub as you are trying to rinse their face and they tear your arms to shreds.

Then there are the heart attacks....

~The heart attacks with the dogs that like to try to lick your nail clippers as you are trying to clip their nails.

~The dogs that sit there nicely and let you clip all of their nails....till the very last nail...then they go for the kill, and go after the nails clipper, or you big time.

~Or, the dogs that think that you are playing with them while you are trying to clip their nails.

They like to watch you, and just as you start to squeeze the clipper, they lung with a playful bite at the clipper.

~And, I can't forget the dogs that insist on hanging their heads right down in front of their feet so that you can not see what you are trying to clip.

Last but not least....the ticklish dogs.

~The dogs that, just as you are about to clip the nail, jerk their foot so hard, or mule kick so hard, that they send your nails clippers sailing across the room.

As if that isn't enough to deal with nails and the dogs.....we come to the pet owners.

You have the owners that could care less as to whether their dogs nails are kept short.

Or, are just ignorant of the fact that dogs need to have their nails clipped regularly.

Then there are the pet owners that have actually gotten angry at me, because I will not clip their dogs nails all of the way back to the toe.

Me: "I am sorry, I don't clip nails back that far. It would be very painful for your dog."

Pet owner: "I don't care. I want the nails cut off. They are tearing up my wood floors!!"

Now, to be fair, I have only had a hand full of pet owners request this of me.

Every one of them got pissed off with me when I refused.

I actually groomed a Standard Poodle whose owner would routinely have his dog put under by the Vet so that said Vet could clip the dogs nails all of the way back to the toes.

Then comes the pet owners who like to accuse you of not clipping their dogs nails when you groomed them.

The only problem is....these owners tend to wait till weeks after the grooming to call you.
Much too late for you to take up for yourself.

Case in point:

I recently had a customer call to say that her dogs nails had not been clipped at the last grooming.

It had been 3 weeks since his dog had been groomed.

The dog was due in for another grooming in 6 days.

The owner did not want to wait till his grooming appointment.

We let him bring his dog in that day to have the nails done.

Yes, they were fairly long, but after 3 weeks there was no way to know whether they had been missed during the last groom.

We are not perfect, but it is highly unlikely that the nails were not clipped.

So I clipped them, and filed them.

Now, I am going to toot my own horn here a little.

I am very good at clipping nails.

I am very good at getting them as short as possible without bleeding them.
I don't want customers coming back and accusing me of not doing the nails, or not getting them short enough.

So, I clipped those nails as short as I could safely get them.

Then I filed them nice and smooth and round.

That same owner came back in six days for the dogs regular grooming.

 This is what the nails looked like 6 days after I had clipped and filed them.

Even I could not believe how much they had grown in 6 days!!

No wonder they made me question whether or not we had clipped them at the last grooming.

Once again I clipped and filed the nails.

Now I have picture proof of how fast this dogs nails grow.

I will not hesitate to pull them out if I am accused of not clipping them again. :/

I personally do not agree with de-clawing any animal, but if dogs were suddenly born without nails....I think that I would do a happy dance. :)

✂ Happy Grooming, MFF ✂