Page 54 - Demo

to switch. She uses a number of dif- ferent products depending on which dog she is bathing and what she wants to achieve. She will use a blue “brightening” shampoo for white dogs even on black dogs because it brightens the whole coat. She doesn’t see much reason to use color-enrich- ing shampoos because they don’t do much, if anything, to darken coats.
There are a number of options for drying your dog. A pet hair dryer is nice to have. It does not heat the air, which can dry and damage the coat, but some models will gently warm the forced air. Pet dryers force air at a much higher rate than human hair dryers, so a lot of the water is blown off the dog rather than evaporated. Lisa works from the feet up when drying dogs. As she goes along she lifts and brushes the coat up to get
volume. The only area of the dog that she does not lift and brush up is along the dog’s spine. She wants a nice, flat coat up there so that the dog’s topline will look level. If the coat along the spine is too fluffy and wavy, the coat can be packed; that is, a grooming spray can be spritzed along the spine and a flat bristle brush used to brush and press the coat down as it dries.
Foreign substances are not allowed to be in the coat when the dog enters the ring. When handlers wish to have whiter whites, especially on their dog’s legs and feet, they will use chalk...but that chalk must be com- pletely brushed out before ring time. Shortly after setting up at a show site, Lisa will wash her dog’s paws with a waterless shampoo to clean them up. Next she will dampen her hands
with water, smooth a small amount of cholesterol in her hands and work that into her dog’s paws and legs, brushing the hair upwards. She then takes a small brush and dips it lightly into chalk powder and works the chalk into the hair. She allows that to dry until close to ring time, when she begins brushing the chalk out of the hair. You must remove all traces of the chalk. Handlers can be excused from the ring if the judge can see or feel chalk on the dog.
So now that grooming a show dog is no longer such a mystery, all of us rookies had better start practicing. As the saying goes, practice makes per- fect. Let’s impress the judges and our more experienced fellow handlers at our next show! See you there!
Lisa readies Shana (Ch. Bijou’s Whole Shebang) for the ring at the Westminster Kennel Club Show in February 2005.
52 The Australian Shepherd Journal May/June 2005