Coats, and what each type actually needs

Never shave a double coat

This is the one that does lasting damage, and it is nearly always done kindly, in summer, to help the animal feel cooler.

A double coat is two layers doing two jobs. The dense undercoat insulates, and it insulates against heat as much as against cold — it holds a layer of air that keeps the sun off the skin. The longer guard hairs shed water and block ultraviolet light. Shaving removes both.

A shaved husky, German shepherd, Samoyed, Icelandic sheepdog or Japanese spitz is not cooler. It is sunburned more easily, bitten by insects more easily, and has lost the mechanism it actually uses.

The regrowth is often wrong too. The undercoat grows back faster than the guard hairs, giving a patchy, woolly, matted texture that never quite recovers, and in some dogs it does not fully regrow at all.

What these coats need instead is the dead undercoat brushed out. An undercoat rake through a moult removes the insulation that is no longer working and leaves the structure intact.

The seasonal moult

Double-coated breeds blow their undercoat twice a year, and the volume astonishes people the first time. A Siberian husky, a Newfoundland or a Finnish lapphund will produce enough undercoat over a fortnight to fill bin bags.

Brush daily through it. Little and often gets far more out than a heroic session at the weekend, and the coat that is not removed becomes the mat you deal with later.

Outdoors if possible, and with a rake or an undercoat tool rather than a bristle brush, which only takes the surface.

Cats moult too, and long-haired cats swallow what they groom off. Brushing through a moult is the most effective hairball prevention there is.

Rabbits matter more than most people realise here: they cannot vomit, so swallowed fur has to pass all the way through. Grooming a moulting rabbit is not cosmetic — it prevents a genuine gut obstruction.

Mats, and why you cannot brush them out

A mat is not a tangle. It is felted hair, and once it has tightened against the skin it pulls constantly, restricts movement, traps moisture and parasites, and hides sores that nobody can see until the mat comes off.

Brushing an established mat hurts. The animal learns that grooming is painful, and after that the whole routine gets harder.

A mat at the skin has to be clipped out — and by a groomer or a vet with clippers, not with scissors. Skin injuries from home de-matting are one of the commonest avoidable wounds vets see, because loose skin lifts into the blades and the cut goes far deeper than intended.

Check the places mats form first: behind the ears, in the armpits, on the britches at the back of the thighs, under a collar, and around the rear.

In cats, matting along the spine and back end is often a medical sign rather than a grooming failure. A cat that has stopped grooming its own back is usually arthritic, overweight or unwell, and the mats are the symptom.

Wire coats: stripping or clipping

A harsh wire coat — border terrier, Airedale, Irish terrier, German wirehaired pointer, Dutch smoushond — is weatherproof because the outer hairs are coarse and dense.

Hand-stripping pulls the dead outer hairs out at the root, which lets the coat regrow with the same harsh texture and colour. It is done a few times a year and takes a couple of hours.

Clipping cuts those hairs off instead. It is quicker and cheaper, and it permanently softens the coat and fades the colour, because what regrows is the softer undercoat. The dog is no worse off in any medical sense, but the coat loses much of its water resistance and does not go back.

Either is a legitimate choice. It is worth making it knowingly rather than discovering it after the first groom.

Curly coats grow forever

Poodles, bichons, Portuguese and Spanish water dogs, Barbets, Bolognese, Cotons, Lagotti and every doodle cross have coats that do not shed out. That sounds like an advantage and it is the single most underestimated cost in pet ownership.

Hair that does not fall out keeps growing, and every hair that would have been shed stays in the coat, where it felts. Left alone, the coat mats solidly to the skin within a couple of months.

The requirement is professional grooming every six to eight weeks — often a substantial sum each visit — plus brushing and combing to the skin several times a week between appointments. Brushing only the surface is worse than useless, because it leaves a smooth top over a solid mat.

The failure mode is a dog that arrives at a groomer pelted, and has to be shaved to the skin under sedation. It is distressing, it is expensive, and it is entirely predictable from the moment the coat is neglected.

Hairless is a grooming routine too

Sphynx, Donskoy, Peterbald, Bambino, Chinese crested and American hairless terrier have no coat to absorb skin oil, so the oil sits on the skin instead.

That means regular bathing — usually every week or two — and cleaning around the nail beds and in any folds, or the skin becomes greasy and prone to blocked pores and infection.

Ears need cleaning more often than in a coated animal, because there is no hair holding wax back.

And skin without hair burns. Shade, and no unfiltered sun through a window that the animal likes to lie in.

Grooming as a health check

The most useful thing about a regular grooming routine is not the coat. It is that somebody puts their hands over the entire animal every week.

Lumps, ticks, scabs, hot spots, sore ears, overgrown nails, a painful hip that flinches when touched — all of these are found during grooming long before they would be noticed otherwise.

A sudden change in coat quality is itself a sign. Dull, greasy, thinning or flaking coat can point to thyroid disease, parasites, poor nutrition or pain that is stopping the animal grooming itself.

Start handling early, keep sessions short and pleasant, and pair them with food. An animal that tolerates being handled is easier to groom, easier to examine and easier to treat.