There’s a lot you can do to keep your dog healthy and happy, but when you have a little puppy at home you don’t want to forget about his nails. Just like human's fingernails, your puppy’s nails grow all the time and needs to be trimmed regularly.
Allowing your dog’s nails to grow too long can cause his toes to spread, it can hamper their ability to walk and run correctly, and in extreme cases, constantly adapting to the discomfort of long nails can cause stress on the dog’s joints and can lead to joint pain or even arthritis.
When & how to start with nail clipping? Our best practice for dog's positive experience.
So we want to show a young puppy clipping nails is something totally normal and pleasant. As you can see in the video, we start with young puppies that are only 2 weeks old, but their nails have to be clipped for the first time.
Of course we will not just hold the puppy and start clipping the nails! We begin touching all parts of the puppy's anatomy from the time they're born in an effort to desensitise the puppy to accept being touched and to prepare them on all kinds of handling, grooming and also nail clipping.
In the video you can see the puppy is almost sleeping. Before the first nail clipping we make sure all puppies were nicely feed and cleaned by their mum and were ready to take a nap. Just before they fall asleep we took each of them separately, cuddle a little and then clipped his nails in order to make it a very positive experience.