How to Groom your Scottish Terrier
By Chris Chamberlin
A Scottish Terrier has one of the easiest coats to keep looking top-notch show quality at home. It can be done provided you are willing to establish good grooming practices from a puppy's very early age. As with all puppies, fluffy and scraggly only works for so long, and soon you find you want yours to look like he was meant to be. With setting the basic grooming procedures as routine for you and your dog right from the beginning, you can have a beautiful looking Scotty for his whole life.
The coat is somewhat on the short side, about two inches and the hard and very coarse wiry topcoat has a soft, dense under-coat. Please note that you will not find two dogs that have identical coats, so some variation in the following methods should be taken into consideration. The time you invest in training your dog to remain still and to enjoy his grooming will be time saved later when the grooming time is cut in half.
Equipment needed:
- Clipper and #81/2 blade
- Thinning and straight scissors
- Stripping knife
- Grooming powder
- Slicker Brush and/or palm brush
- Nail trimmers
Step One
It is essential, as with any breed, to thoroughly brush out the coat before beginning a successful grooming job. Once you have removed any tangles and loosened the free hair with a vigorous brushing, you can add a grooming powder, starting at the withers, to aid in the plucking procedure to follow.
Step Two
Hand plucking is absolutely the finest way to achieve the most natural and pleasing look to your Scottish Terrier. Stripping knives are used more often than not for a bare resemblance, in half the time, to the hand plucked version.
Using your index finger and thumb start pulling the dead and or loosened hairs following the direction of the way the hair grows. Hold the skin above the area you are going to strip out so the skin has little give. Pull straight out and down. If you turn your hand, especially while using a knife, you will create a curly coat. This is a sure sign of a poorly managed coat. Tip: If you keep the skin taut, as all skin will stretch, you will lift the hair to be pulled and it will make it easier to spot the hairs need to be removed. Add more powder as needed as you progress along the body. Follow an imagined line from the breast bone to the pelvic bone below the rectum, blending smoothly from the neck down the shoulders and to the tip of the tail and over the to the sides, gradually blending with the longer coat of the ribs and legs. Once you have stripped from the withers to the rump to below the tail where you will see the cowlick, you can precede to the sides. Clean up any straggly hairs around the rectum with scissors to finish to a smooth look.
Step Three
The blending and plucking you have achieved over the body is only the beginning. After all, you don't want an obvious poofy pants look on the dog. Continue to remove hair that is dead along his sides and legs. All excess hair from elbow, lower ribs and bend in his thighs should be sufficient so he doesn't appear to be wearing a skirt. When complete, you should be able to see daylight under any Scottie.
Step Four
The head is a work of art in itself. As previously stated to achieve the correct look, hand plucking is preferred. Hand stripe the neck and throat. And finish off any standout hairs with clippers. You can achieve relatively the same look on the head with clippers. Using a # 8 trim away to blend smoothly into the back of the neck and throat to chest. Remove the hair between the eyes to form a "V" at the stop between the brows. Comb brows forward and thin so the shortest hairs are at the outside edge of the eye and graduate longer to the inside corner of the eye. They should not be so thick as to hide the eye.
Clean off the ears using a #15 blade so the tip of the ear is smooth and blend with thinning scissors at the base to the back of the head and ear. Clip only the top half of the front of the ear tip. Clean off the top of the back skull with a clipper and blend to the neck.
The beard should not look scruffy or too long. A bit of grooming powder will single out the dead hair that needs to be removed to give a healthy flowing beard.
From the corner of the mouth to the outside corner of the eye imagine a line that you will use as a guide to blend from that to the base of the ear. You can use the clipper and a #8 blade to finish a smooth look.
At the base of the ear at the front, the hairs should be plucked so they do not extend past half way up and to the edge of the ears. The tuft should balance the ear. The larger the ear, the larger the tuft.
Finally
This is a basic stripping for a dog in the rough with hair ready to blow. It requires repetitive stripping over a number of weeks to achieve a routine hair-a-day grooming for your dog to remain show-ready any day of the week.
There are a number of excellent how-to's on grooming your Scottie available today, and this is just one method to try. You will discover what works best for you and your dog through practice. When grooming your pet Scottie, you can achieve a temporary show look with clippers using a #7 on his back and #10 on face and ears following the same patterns as described above.
Happy Grooming, Chris