Hand-Stripping
Dead coat pulled out by finger and thumb, on a rolling calendar, so a wire jacket keeps its colour and its crispness instead of going soft and grey under a clipper.
- Kind
- Grooming
- Price
- From $190
- Duration
- 3h – 5h
A wire coat is two coats: a harsh outer jacket that grows to a set length and then dies, and a soft undercoat beneath it. Clip the jacket and you cut the dead hair off level with the living undercoat. Do that four times and the harsh coat stops being replaced. The dog goes soft, pale and woolly, and no amount of later stripping brings the colour back properly.
So we pull it. Finger and thumb, a few hairs at a time, only the hair that is ready to come. It does not hurt a coat that is ready — the test is whether it releases without the skin tenting — and a dog that flinches is a dog whose coat is not ready yet.
Rolling, not resetting
Most people meet stripping as a once-a-year event: everything off, a naked dog for three weeks, then five months of glory and four months of mess. We would rather roll. Every six to eight weeks we take the longest third of the jacket and leave the rest, so the coat is permanently staggered and the dog is permanently presentable.
Rolling costs more across a year and looks better on every day of it. It is also kinder: three hours every two months instead of five hours twice.
Honest arithmetic
| Clipped | Rolled strip | |
|---|---|---|
| Visit | 90 min | 3h – 5h |
| Cost a year | ~$600 | ~$960 |
| Colour | fades within a year | holds |
| Texture | soft, cotton-like | harsh, weatherproof |
If the dog is fourteen, arthritic, or simply hates standing, clip it. We will do that without a lecture and without disapproval. A comfortable soft dog is a better outcome than a correct miserable one. But if you have a two-year-old Border terrier and you want that coat to look like a Border terrier’s coat at eight, this is how.