After grooming, one of my best important tips is to do with nails. Now the tip is, and in fact most dogs, most of the time don't need the nail trimming.

A dog that spends any amount of time running on hard surfaces, so out on the roads or even on hard packed grounds in the summer will wear their nails down naturally. And I see a lot of people coming into the surgery with dogs saying they need the nails trimming and in fact they're absolutely fine.

So how do you check if your dog does need the nails trimming? Well, you pick up the foot and generally if you can't see the nails very well, if they're basically covered in fur, that's a pretty good sign. But really what they should do is they should just be leveled with the bottom of the pad. So if you look at Jack's nail there and I roam my finger along the bottom of his pad, the nail is coming down to meat here and it's also forming the shape of a letter R, roughly that is a corto circle. You know your dog's nail was a too long, if that goes around to more like a letter B, so it comes right the way around. If it's beyond a corto circle, that's when it needs trimming.

So if you think your dog's nails do need trimming obviously you can come to your vet to make him do your job. But this is something you can do yourself at home and the first thing you need to do is equip yourself with some suitable nail trimmers and there's a few different types out here. But I would strongly advise you to avoid nail clippers like this because they tend to crush and squeeze the dog's nail and that could be very painful.

So go for one which actually encircles the nail like this and they just encircle the nail and guillotine and that's very effective and as much less painful for the dog or for smaller dog, something like this should be a proper guillotine and that just quickly snips off the nail.

So to trim your dog's nails, what you need to do is have the dog's suitably restrained, I mean Jack is very good here, if your dog has a bit more trouble, get a friend just to hold the dog and then you just need to hold the dog firmly and just trim off, line up the clip as with the bottom of the pad and trim off any excess. If your dog has got light color now this is much easier because you can see that quick which is there where the blood vessels and the nerves in it, and you can avoid that leaving perhaps three millimeters or so beyond the quag so you don't cause any bleeding.

If your dog has got black nails, it's a bit trickier because you can't see the quag so you have to go again by this rule of just cutting off what is below the level of the pad. If you're in any doubt, leave it longer. It's going to do much less harm, if you it long and then cutting it too short and if you're not sure, it's best to let your vet do it and let your vet show you exactly what to do. So in general just to summarize on nails, most dogs, most of the time don't need their nails trimmed you can check by checking whether it looks like a letter R or letter B and whether it's coming below the level of the pad. If it does need doing get yourself with a decent pair of clippers out and just take a lot of care of not getting too short.