The Cooperative Care Nail Trims Resource Guide
Nails are commonly the most challenging part of animal husbandry in grooming.
Whether you’re a dog owner or pet professional, there are some amazing products out there to help you and make nail trimming much easier.
Groomers, send your clients here! This is information for you and them. We’ve all had dogs who are challenging for nails, but this can help us work together and empower pet parents with up to date and humane tools and practices.
Just going to the drawer where you keep your nail trimmers can send a dog running to the other room. Nail trims can be traumatizing for all parties, and can be such an aversive that our dogs (and ourselves) try to avoid it until absolutely necessary.
As a fear free certified dog groomer that specializes in cooperative care, I’ve found a lot of ways to help dogs during nail trimming in the grooming environment. It wasn’t always as easy to trim nails, and I’m sure I made a fair share of dogs worse for it before I understood more about behavior.
When I worked for other salons, nails were included in the service. They absolutely had to get done. We had groomers helpers, lots of loops, muzzles, full body lift gear, you name it. Most of the time if you held their leg tight enough or fought them hard enough, you could get their nails done. This is now a pretty dated technique. It makes me cringe thinking about how much restraint I used on dogs before. There’s importance to this story though, especially if you’re a pet professional.
The important part of reflecting on my old practices is this question: Who’s job is it to make sure a dogs needs are taken care of? The answer: their owner. Of course if they’ve taken their dog to you, a pet professional, they’re paying you to provide this service for them. This does not mean we must hold dogs down or add more gear until we can perform a service on their dog though. Remember that its okay to say no to all or a part of the service if its unsafe for you or the pet, even though that can be hard to do.
If you as the pet professional deems it unsafe to trim nails, you do not have to push the dog through a nail trim. Safety is the key word here, too. Dogs can and have been injured or worse during a nail trim in a grooming salon. Luckily, there are so many more resources out there on animal husbandry and humane practices.
A note for my fellow animal professionals out there: If you’re reading this and thinking “well, I still hold dogs paws and use restraints on my table…” I see you. I was taught the same way as many of us were. You are not a bad person for doing what is seen as acceptable in this grooming industry and what you were taught. I’m here to share about my own cross-over into the fear free and cooperative care world. These changes didn’t happen overnight for me. Once I did fully switch to working with the dogs instead of against them, it changed my life. I found new connections and joys with the dogs who I once thought were just being jerks.
Now onto the fun stuff - education and products!
The right tools and knowledge makes the process so much easier.
Help! I can’t do my dogs nails!
by Deborah Jones, PhD
This e-book is everything you could ever ask for when trying to figure out nail trimming. This guide can help even those without animal handling experience learn how to do their dog’s nails.
It’s 79 pages and filled with the answers to any questions you could have about nails and trimming them. One of my favorite things about this book is the outlined touch and handling steps. This is absolutely amazing in breaking down all the small steps you take from moving your hand towards your dog to actually tapping and squeezing on nails, which are the very end steps to the 12 step process in the book. This is a great read for groomers and owners, or as a resource to send to an owner of a dog who has difficulty with nail trimming.
Before I would just try to explain conditioning theory as simple as I could to owners after telling them nails were not going to happen at the salon today, but this is going to be so much easier to send my owners to then me trying to explain stress thresholds to my clients while the chihuahua math meme is happening in their heads.
ScratchPad for dogs
Scratch pads and boards are an amazing alternative for dogs who aren’t comfortable with nail clipping. This takes the restraint out of nail care all together.
ScratchPad is currently the only scratch board endorsed by Fear Free Pets. They offer the ScratchPads themselves, videos on how to teach your dog to use them (for front and back feet!), and even have personalized training plans for dogs and owners who need a little more help getting started.
Their starter pack retails for $95 but is currently on sale for $63.95! This is a great product to offer owners as an alternative to having their dogs nail clipped at the salon.
Fear Free near me
Fear Free is an online education platform for pet professionals. Becoming a fear free certified groomer was the first step in leaning more about animals emotional wellbeing for me. It gave me a solid foundation, and they have a ton of information and other classes on their site available to members.
From their website, “Fear Free provides online education to veterinary professionals, pet professionals, animal welfare communities, and pet owners. Our courses are developed and written by the most respected veterinary and pet experts in the world, including boarded veterinary behaviorists, boarded veterinary anesthesiologists, pain experts, boarded veterinary internists, veterinary technicians (behavior), experts in shelter medicine, animal training, grooming, boarding, and more.”
They have a great search engine on their website that will show you pet professionals in your area that are fear free certified! This is a perfect place to go if your dog is having some behavioral problems with grooming handling and nail trims.
Remember, dog trainers are your go to for behavioral problems in dogs! Even if it’s grooming related.
Creating Great Grooming Dogs
Chrissy Neumyer Smith MGBS CPG CBCC CPDT FFP is a professional dog groomer, behavior consultant, and host of Creating Great Grooming Dogs. This podcast takes a modern and science based approach in combining behavior and grooming. I saw the biggest positive changes in my career after listening to her podcasts, and I’m so grateful that I found this amazing resource.
Whether you’re a pet professional or pet parent looking for some more insight on how we can help dogs be calm, comfortable, and cooperative, you’ll find up to date information provided by a certified professional here.
There’s a lot of great new perspectives on animal handling that have been huge lightbulb moments in working with dogs using cooperative care. This is also a great podcast for dog trainers, as its hard to know exactly what’s happening (and what groomers expect to happen!) at the salon.
Chrissy has a podcast all about nail trimming that you can find here, but if you like to listen to podcasts you can always find something new and useful in her episodes.
If you’re looking for more information like this, Chrissy teaches her Master Groomer Behavior Specialist class. If you have an interest in behavior and want to pursue a master groomer certificate, I highly recommend this course. You can find more information on the course here.
