Coping with Seasonal Pet Shedding

It's an unmistakable sign that spring is near: clumps of dog hair on your clothes, floor and furniture. Even shorthaired breeds manage to cover us and our homes with the stuff.

Shedding is a fact of life. It is part of the natural cycle of hair growth on your pet. After each growing stage, there is a resting stage during which the old hair is shed out. Hair is lost all year long, but the heaviest shedding occurs seasonally.

What to do

While shedding is inevitable, it is possible to reduce the amount of hair the family pet leaves around the house. If you want to tackle the problem at home, professional groomers recommend the following steps:

• After a thorough brush and combing, start with a shampoo. Use only products formulated specifically for pets because animals have a different skin pH than humans. Massage in well, and follow with a conditioning rinse.
• Thoroughly brush and comb your pet's coat to dry it and remove dead hair. After systematically brushing through the coat, use a professional steel-pinned comb to make sure that all the knots and shedding hair have been removed.
• Brush and comb at least weekly -- more often for pets with long coats - to remove hair as it is shed out. It is best to dampen the dry coat with a conditioning coat spray to prevent coat breakage. You might want to do this outdoors on the deck or patio to keep the hair out of the house.
• The process will need to be repeated throughout the pet's shedding cycle - usually during the spring and summer months.

A better alternative

If your pet is a heavy shedder or you simply don't want to bother with all that work and mess at home, there is an alternative. Best Friends grooming salons nationwide now offer an effective new grooming procedure, called Shedicure, which reduce the amount of hair being shed around your home by as much as 80%.

The Shedicure procedure starts with a massaging shampoo to loosen hair. Step 2 involves hand drying during which the pet's coated is brushed and combed while special high volume dryers are used to loosen and blow out hair. Finally, the groomer uses a special tool and a "carding" technique to remove remaining excess undercoat.

Following the procedure it takes about a day for the coat to settle, during which there will be some additional shedding. After that settling out period, most pet owners are surprised by the significant reduction in shedding at home.

Nothing can total eliminate natural shedding, but repeating the Shedicure procedure every 3 to 6 weeks during shedding season can leave most of that shed hair at the salon floor instead of on your carpets and furniture. Some breeds seem to shed all the time and may require the process year-round.

For more information about Shedicure or help with other grooming problems, visit or call the Best Friends center nearest you.