How to Trim your Dog's Nails

With your toenail trimmers, you do want to hold them parallel to the bottom of the pad.

Today we're going to show you how to trim your dog's toenails. Things you're going to need are some styptic powder, some nail trimmers that are going to be appropriate to your dog's size, and potentially some treats or something delicious that they love to snack on.

 

This is Yuki, and we're going to show you how to trim his toenails. So you're going to want to start out just by isolating a toe. Find out which one you're going to cut. Yuki has very long toe hair, so we're going to have to kind of push some of that back just so we can get a nice good visualization of what we're going to do.

 

Here on the dog's toenail, and he's a really good example, you can see that there's this lovely pretty pink section, and then there's a white tip. The pink section is called the quick, and that's what you want to avoid kind of cutting when you are trimming their toenails. You just want to trim anything that's white.

 

Okay, so we are going to start. With your toenail trimmers, you do want to hold them parallel to the bottom of the pad. So if you can see - it might be a little bit hard to see with so much hair - that here's the bottom of his pad, and his toenail extends a little bit past that. So, for a nice safe cut, you want to cut even and parallel with that pad.

 

Don't be afraid to go slow and just do a couple of little bits at a time. You don't have to do the whole foot or the whole toenail all at once. with him, he can get a little bit nervous, so we're just going to take little mini bits and give him lots of breaks, and lots of praise in between.

 

Good boy, Yuki. Okay, so again you want to do it nice and flat across the cut. Good boy. Good job, handsome. And some peanut butter. There you go, good boy.

 

And just like that, you can work your way through the toenails. Again, you don't have to do them all at once. You don't have to do them all at the same time. So if you want to break it up, one toenail a day, or one foot a day. It helps kind of desensitize your dog, make it easier for you to cut their toenails.