About Trimming

The term ‘trimming’ includes several techniques to enhance coat dog's full potential.

Several techniques are specifically used for hard coats’ Terriers such as:  strip out, finley, fine stripping, plucking and blending.

Strip out:  It’s used to cut all the dog’s coat to remove completely dead hair in order to let the new one grows.

Finley: This term means the hard and very short hair attached to the skin. This kind of hair has to remain and follow the lengths along the neck, the side head and the breast.

Fine stripping: It is done with the aid of a stripping knife. The purpose is to remove dead hair and maintain the natural texture and different lengths of the coat along the body.

Plucking:  Plucking means ‘to tear’.  Plucking the hair with four fingers will achieve the look without the use of tools. It helps to remove small quantity of hair quickly and won't allow the shin to be pulled up as you go along.

Blending:  It means to shape the coat in order to give a smooth line without cleavage on the dog’s hair. It’s necessary to blend hair on the chest into the side coat, and up underneath to give a smooth line from the chest and shoulders to the tuck-up.  

Now that we know better the meaning of ‘trimming’, we can start working on keeping the Terriers’ rough hair.  Professional handlers will use the stripping technique only one time as once used it the new hair will grow and it will be kept hard all the year around. The focus, as said before,  is to  enhance coat dog's full potential; to accomplish this, handlers have to  ‘work’ on the dog once a week by removing hair only where it’s necessary and keeping always a smooth shape of the coat.

It’s essential to know the characteristics of hard-haired dogs whose hair completes its cycle of time very fast.  If this hair is cut erroneously using a knife or similar gadgets, the skin might get irritated and infected as well.  Knowing the characteristics of hard hair is very significant for keeping the dogs’ coat at his full potential.

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