This is Candy, a Norfolk terrier. She’s in the group of dogs that have a hand stripped coat.

Hand stripping involves the removal of the dead top coat leaving the soft fluffy and the coat, which you remove the dead one to let the new coat come through. Now if we hand strip at the right and correct time, the new coat starts to come through, and this tough coat is actually dead, and this is remove by gently plucking out with your fingers.

To assist with this we groom it through with the slicker brush, great for coat apart up to the section towards her head and with the coat growth. So a bit like you don’t have you brush it up in the wrong way then —ops, we don’t do it. That’s taking out quite long dead on the coat coming through.

Now we stands that coat, tension the skin and start just gently plucking this dead tough coats as you can see this is tightly different coat to the under coat which is lighter and a softer fluffy texture.

We will try to cover the dog, very gently so it doesn’t hurt as I say if you remove this and it hurts the dog it’s not ready to come out, and it’s the question of testing the dog’s coat. Just get a few hairs and if they come easily then the dog is ready to what we called pull.

Here is Frank Edwards with hand stripping.