Welcome To The Podcast Ep1

You're listening to Creating Great Grooming Dogs. I'm Chrissy Neumyer Smith. I'm a certified professional groomer, certified behavior consultant for Canines, and certified professional dog trainer, and this, my friends and colleagues, is the podcast where grooming and training meet. I am starting this podcast because there needs to be more communication between a wide variety of dog professionals and dog owners. It’ll help get us all up to date in making positive changes for the dogs.

Grooming is a complicated issue because there are so many things that we do during grooming, but a dog that knows how to be good for grooming is going to have a better time at the vet's office. They're going to have an easier time with their own owners keeping them clean, keeping their eyes clean, um maybe giving medications. So if we can all start talking together and being on the same page, then we can start making some really great changes for these dogs.

Grooming starts with talking to our customers. I think that it's very important for us to explain to our customers ahead of time what to expect from a grooming, especially if we've never met the dog. But if we know the dog has problems, I tell all of my customers about my safety policy. And if you are a groomer, I would like for you to implement a safety policy that you explain to customers ahead of time.

Let me tell you a little bit of what I tell my own customers. It's that if at any time your dog starts getting really antsy, really worked up, afraid, aggressive, or even overly silly, I'm going to take the time to back off and calm your animal down. And that's for teaching them to be good for the future, but it's also a safety issue because we are using sharp tools. We're using sharp tools, we're up on a raised surface, there are lots of ways for a dog to get hurt or a groomer to get hurt, and a calm dog is necessary.

So when I tell them ahead of time, now we can open a dialogue about, well, what are we going to do if my dog isn't calm? And I also can tell them more about how we handle that. So a dog that isn't calm, I'm—I'm going to calm them down because I'm working toward long-term progress. I want them to be calm and cooperative and think that this is not scary. When we push a dog too far, what happens is that they're left thinking that was scary, that was uncomfortable, that was, you know, upsetting. So by working on it right now in this particular grooming session, and working on progress during this grooming session, we're building for the future.

When I explain it to owners, how helpful it can be for them—that this is for you, this is so that your dog can learn how to be better for grooming, for vet visits, for their own handling at home, to be able to, you know, wipe off feet, clean out eye boogies, brush—so when we're talking to them about calming the dog down, I want you as groomers to also be remembering that they're paying us for our time. At that point, it's no longer about if this grooming is perfect. We're not selling perfect trims to dogs with behavior problems. We can save our perfect trims for dogs who are letting us do our job right.

I want you to be thinking in terms of: I am a dog groomer, and I am here to put a nice trim and to take care of your dog on dogs that are good. I'm going to give you a parallel here because I think most of us would not put a trim over mats. Right? There's no “the customer's always right.” We're like: no, I can't put a trim over mats. That's not safe. That's not healthy. We can't do that. No, I'm not going to make him look cute and leave matted fur underneath. And I want you to parallel that with: I'm not going to try to do a perfect trim over a behavior problem because that is also not safe. That is not healthy.

So we can get out of this whole “the customer's always right” and instead start thinking, okay, I'm going to help you get this dog to be good for the future because we're going to be grooming this dog for 15 years. That's usually the baseline I tell my customers. Okay, the next 15 years of your dog's life, I want those groomings to be something that your dog can handle.

So tell them that they're spending your time. They'll still have to pay for grooming. It's not about if the dog is perfect, but we are planning on the future. We're trying to make your dog better. And I look for progress during every single grooming, and I will teach you more about that. We'll talk a lot more about that. But for right now, be thinking: if you present it in the beginning as a safety policy, a lot of your problem will go away later when you're thinking, oh shoot, what do I charge them? I mean, I really couldn't get them done, and, um, you know, because he was a little bit crazy so he's not really finished. And should I charge them more because he was hard?

I find groomers really struggling with this. They end up charging $5 extra or something, which is—is ridiculous. Right? I'll be honest. It's ridiculous because you are working with a dog who is so much harder than what you should have to work with. Right? You're here to do trims on dogs who will let you do your job. Dogs who are worked up, dogs who are aggressive, dogs who are overly silly—whatever the problem may be—is pushing your skills even further. Don't charge less for that.

So if you have already talked to them ahead of time, you're telling them, I have a certain amount of time in my day allotted for your dog, and I'm going to spend that time with them. If I can—you know, I mean, if it's a dog that you have to send home early, then of course adjust your pricing. But don't charge $5 extra.

I worked for one groomer a long time ago, and I was making commission there, and they would put like a $5 surcharge on. And I was thinking, you know, I'm making commission on $5, so that 45 minutes I spent—extra 45 minutes I spent on that dog—got me a cup of coffee. That's crazy. Right? Nobody works for that kind of cheap money. And those owners didn't appreciate it because they actually didn't understand. They're still thinking they're buying a trim, and we don't have a trim to sell. We're selling a service.

So if we get them into the idea that, well, this is the service I offer, but your dog is more work because of this behavior problem, then we can also prepare them for: this is how we can avoid this problem in the future. This is how we can work on it right now.

I would like you to have an idea of a trainer locally that you can send dogs to if they're having problems. Of course, I would like groomers to have more knowledge on how to handle the dogs who are having a problem, but to be able to work on making this dog better for grooming, and to prepare the owners ahead of time so that you're still making your money. You don't give that away for free. If they're really like, I'm not going to pay a groomer to train my dog, then you tell them: excellent. The first sign of a problem, I send your dog home, and you and your trainer can work on that and bring him back when he's better prepared.

Because grooming is not training. You can add that if you choose to, which I'd like for you to choose to, but don't give it away and don't assume that you have to get that dog done. In fact, many, many times, that's how we as groomers get hurt. We're trying to get it done. We're trying to get it done on a dog who is struggling. And what happens is that either a dog bites, or they twist their leg, or they fling up against us and end up hurting us—hurting our back. Like, there's a lot of ways to get hurt in a grooming shop.

Most owners need to understand that. They really don't have a clue, so educating our owners is the first step toward teaching dogs to be good for grooming. And when we have a more educated client base, and they know, all right, if he's silly, they're going to work with him and help him be a better dog for future groomings—I don't have a problem selling that. Owners—you’d be surprised—if we take the time to explain it, they're like, oh, well yeah, naturally, that makes sense to me.

There are a number of training protocols out there for a variety of individual grooming, handling, and husbandry issues, and some of you guys are doing some fantastic, fantastic work. Sadly, much of this work doesn't reach the grooming table, and my goal is to help us—trainers, groomers, veterinary staff, owners—to look at these issues in a different way and provide more overlap of behaviors and ultimately less work all around for the dog and for all of us.

So one of the hang-ups I see is when a trainer makes a beautifully detailed plan that looks overwhelming for a groomer to implement. I'm a behavior geek. I love reading through all of these big, big plans. But the fact is that a groomer isn't likely to see an eight-step process for putting on a muzzle that could take a week to achieve and implement that. That doesn't make sense to anybody who's not a behavior geek.

So when we think about that, I really want you to think about: instead, talk about the end goal first, because so many of you have such great ideas. Talk about the end goal first. So as an example: the dog will willingly push their nose into the muzzle for easy and safe on and offs and feel comfortable wearing the muzzle. Most groomers would say, hey, that sounds like a nice thing. I would like to have that.

Then describe the amount of time that it could take—because every dog is different—and the steps that you could use to get you there. And I'm going to say could use because not every dog has to start at step one. Why do we kind of assume that we would need to start off with, you know, I show you the muzzle, and then, you know, good things happen? A lot of dogs don't need to start there.

So if a groomer has a better picture of what exactly the end product is and a variety of steps to get you there, then they can also backtrack on their own and say, I think I can start this dog on step three. Or they could say, I think I'd like to send these steps home with the owner or for the owner and trainer to work on so that I can then just use this new muzzle skill.

You know, I also want you to think about—we spend time working on just one thing, and that may be necessary for an individual dog, but we can multitask. The goal of allowing a person to touch them all over while standing and allow repositioning is amazingly easy for owners to help with at home. We just need to define it for them and help them understand how things work and why things work.

It's a base behavior for so many grooming and veterinary procedures, and teaching this skill makes all of the other skills easier. So instead of focusing on, let's say, nails, we've been working on standing, sitting, being reached over—that's a big one that a lot of owners don't work on, but it's required for restraining an animal, holding for blood drawing, things like that—so being reached over, holding, repositioning legs, paws, toes, and touching nails. That's part of a “touching all over” base training.

Think about that base training as the beginning set of: hey, you are now learning your ABCs and you're learning to spell and read. It's very, very base training. And when it comes time to teach about something else, like eye ointment, we don't need to start at the very beginning again because the dog is fluent in being touched all over as their baseline.

So the dog is already fluent in: oh, we're touching your head, we're touching near your eye, we're moving this fur around your nose, we're touching your ears. So we don't need to start at the very beginning for each and every behavior. Being touched anywhere with an object and then adding the difficulty level of objects that make sound or vibrate or blow air is yet another way to generalize.

So a dog that's fluent with being touched all over with things is prepared to learn about something new and skip the multiple steps to introduce it. So if we already have these behaviors, we can start off with: hey, stand up, I'm going to touch your side with this. And maybe this is a stethoscope or a brush or a bandage or a clipper. But with this knowledge base, it's a matter of introducing the new thing and working some training if the new thing does something different for or to the dog—like deposits ointment into an eye, or wraps around them like a bandage and stays on, or clips off a piece of toenail, or beeps when the thermometer is done taking the temperature.

Then we have a little bit of training to do, but we don't have to start at the very beginning. The dog is used to being touched all over, maneuvered, handled, standing, repositioned, and used to being touched with things that make a variety of noises, and is comfortable with it.

Training plans often allow the dog to walk away if they're uncomfortable at any time, and what we're looking for is the dog to feel comfortable enough to choose to interact with us. And I understand why this is so popular and why it works so well and really is something that we as trainers do pretty routinely.

I want to point out though that you need to teach the dog to go beyond that point. When a groomer has a dog on a table, the gold standard of the grooming industry is for the dog to be safely clipped to the grooming arm with a grooming loop and for the groomer to have a hand on the dog at all times.

So think about if you're training for not being touched—not for not being touched, but for being able to walk away when you choose to disengage—then we're not really teaching them what they're going to need to know for safe grooming. A dog who expects to be able to walk away is cornered, and that creates a really stressful and unsafe environment. They're on the table. They can't get away.

And even when we as groomers would like to let the dog walk away, we need to be able to reach for them, unclip them, wrap our arms around them, pick them up, and safely lower them to the floor, where they'll still have to be on a leash because there are other animals in the room.

So we need to be thinking about the bigger picture and why grooming skills are a little bit different than veterinary skills, because a lot of that wouldn't have to happen at a vet's office. And a lot of that wouldn't have to happen at home if they're simply working on nails.

So being able to work on that—the way I like to work on it is to be able to spend time teaching the dog to calm down in your hands. And that's a really important part of teaching them to be handled all over. Calm down in your hands. We may put the tool down and calm again before moving on, but we can't let go and we can't entirely disengage.

So it's part of teaching them to be touched all over, repositioned, get them used to remaining with us and working with us, and having gentle loving restraint, and to calm down in our hands because that will translate to everybody else and it will translate well on a grooming table. Like, hey buddy, all right, let's calm down again in my hands.

And when we're working on teaching a dog to be handled all over, it's really easy for us to also spend time teaching them an endurance run—teaching them to do it longer than they want to—and helping them calm down in our hands when they need to before they can walk away. And unlike veterinary behaviors, a grooming session really is a long skill. It's not fast. It's not like we can do five minutes.

I'm not trying to belittle veterinary procedures—I was a vet tech, I understand the whole veterinary procedure—but grooming is an endurance run. Let me give you an example.

Just a bath example for a dog who—say the dog is sensitive to having their feet handled—they will need to allow the groomers to: one, spray the feet with water; two, scrub between the toes with soap; three, spray with water again; four, scrub with soap again; five, spray with water again; six, smooth in some conditioner; seven, spray with water again; eight, squeeze out the water with the hands or a towel; nine, blow with a high-velocity dryer; ten, towel off the foot.

And many owners—sorry, many groomers—will also do some brushing and combing. That would be eleven skills or eleven repetitions. And/or twelve, nail trimming and grinding in the tub too. So that’s ten to twelve foot-handling behaviors in just the bath.

If the dog was unable to walk away, or if we didn’t have a hand on them at all times, they're really stressed out. So we can at least teach them, hey, by the way, this is what it is to be having all of this done and be comfortable with it and be calm in our hands. And that really better prepares them for grooming.

So while you're doing your training sessions with dogs, think about adding repetitions and think about adding some variety. So again, with the bath example with feet, by variety I mean that might be while we're holding your paw, we're also taking a comb or looking at the underside of the paw, looking at the top side of the paw, moving your leg to check the paw, moving the toenail clippers or a file or a grinder. So be thinking about: it's more than just, hey, we're going to touch your paw and a long pause while we do stuff and click, good job. We need to have more than that for the grooming process.

Many groomers think that everybody must know that that's how the grooming process works. And I'm not trying to belittle my grooming buddies either. I see you all as my colleagues. You're all here for a reason. You're all paying attention, and that's awesome. But I want you to think that the average trainer has never done a grooming on a dog. You need to think about all of the things that happen.

For instance, before the dog is even in the bathtub, they've probably gone through everything on the CGC list, the Canine Good Citizen list. They've been walked in on a leash, they've seen dogs, they've seen people, they've been passed off to another person, they've been put in a crate. I mean, so many things have already happened before we even get them in the tub.

So when I want us to have dogs who can handle more and not have to start at the beginning for everything that we train, it's really going to be important for groomers. It's really going to be important for dog owners. It's really going to be important for the vets and for trainers. Gosh, you know, think about how happy your customers are going to be when you have a broader view of how to help them with their problem.

What I would like ideally is for groomers to know that there are a variety of trainers near them who know how to teach the dog to be good for the endurance run that is a grooming session. I want veterinarians to know there are trainers out there who can help them. You know, I'm a fear-free certified trainer. I really want everything to be fear free, whether it's grooming or training.

But the idea of just letting a dog walk away when they are uncomfortable isn't going to be the finished product.