- Home Page
- Membership
- About ESAA
- About the Breed
- Judges Education
- Breeder Listing
- Futurity/Maturity
- Rescue
- Health & Genetics
- Events
- Members Only
- Library & Gallery
- ESAA STORE
- Junior Handlers
2021 ESAA National Information![]() |
![]() Join Us on Facebook |
Grooming Guidance
A challenge facing new English Setter owners is learning to groom. Not
rare but not plentiful, English Setters must often be imported from
several states away. There may be no experienced groomer living near the
new owner to demonstrate grooming techniques unique to this long-coated
breed.
Help is here in the form of a DVD produced by the Kettle Moraine English
Setter Club. If a picture is worth a thousand words, moving pictures with
audio must be worth at least a million words. Seeing the grooming tools
used and hearing techniques explained in video format makes understanding
what to do and how to do it easier.
On the DVD, knowledgeable members of the club demonstrate how to use
clippers, thinning shears, stripping knives, grooming stones, ear cleaner,
and nail clippers on English Setters with several different structures,
coat textures, and markings. They demonstrate how to adapt your grooming
technique to fit the dog you are grooming and to accentuate the dog’s
positive traits. They demonstrate how to groom various parts of the
English Setter, including head, throat, hocks, feet, tail, chest, and
body, especially that most difficult area, shoulders.
They emphasize using the English Setter Breed Standard as the blueprint
for grooming. For example, the standard calls for a prominent occiput and
stop, and the DVD shows how to heighten those traits on any English
Setter.
Here are a few tips that are not included on the DVD.
Frequent (at least weekly) brushing of the furnishings is a must, or your
ES will develop dense mats that are tedious to brush out and painful for
the dog. A quick mist with conditioner or detangler and regular gentle
brushing with a pin brush or soft slicker brush keeps mats from becoming a
problem.
Always bathe your ES indoors with warm water (exception, hot summer days
when cool water from the hose feels good). Not only is a cold bath
extremely unpleasant for the dog, but it could also bring on “cold tail,”
a condition where the tail lies limp and seems numb. A dog with cold tail
is in pain and cannot be shown because it can’t lift its tail level with
the back while gaiting. If a show site cannot provide warm water, you can
bring an electric tea kettle (and perhaps a generator for electricity) to
heat up some water for your dog’s table bath.
If you don’t have a raised doggie bathtub, you can bathe your dog in your
own bathtub with a hose, obtainable from any hardware store, attached to
your shower head.
A grooming table makes the grooming process much easier. If you don’t have
one, you can make something that works pretty well. Get a one-inch-thick
piece of plywood, 24” x 42,” glue a piece of carpet or rubber matting to
the entire top, bungee it securely to the top of your dog crate or sturdy
table about 30” high, attach a grooming arm with a clamp, and add a loop
(a.k.a. noose)that goes around the dog’s neck. The arm, clamp, and loop
are available from most on-line dog equipment suppliers.
Thanks to the Kettle Moraine English Setter Club for providing this
valuable resource for folks who want to learn to groom their English
Setters themselves. To order the 80-minute grooming DVD, go to
http://www.kmesc.org/ .