FASHION OR FUNCTION?

Long hair on a dog can be an annoying bur magnet

There was a cracking picture on the cover of Shooting Times last month (10 August) of a cocker retrieving a grouse. As a photograph it was great: a narrow depth of field so only the dog’s head and grouse were in sharp focus, complemented by a blurred background of purple heather. To my eye, only one thing jarred: the spaniel was in desperate need of a haircut.

It’s never been traditional to clip spaniels, but these dogs rarely needed much more than trimming of their feathers. Look at old photos of working spaniels, both cockers and springers, and I challenge you to find the sort of woolly dogs we see today. Spaniels, and cockers in particular, have become hairier.

I know that some owners love the wild, untrimmed look of an unclipped spaniel, with thick, full ears, a floppy fringe and crown, and a body bulked out by a mass of fur. To my eye, these dogs look more like a sheep waiting to go to the shearer than a proper working spaniel.

I can’t see such a dog without wanting to reach for the clippers. If spaniels could talk, I’m sure that they wouldn’t want to be so hairy, especially in the sort of summer we have just had.

Dogs don’t only overheat if their fur is too long and too thick; the fur also acts as a magnet for every seed or bur there is. I remember once on an October partridge day watching a picker-up spend the whole of his lunch break trying to remove burdock seeds (the things that stick like Velcro) from the ears of his two spaniels.

They defeated his comb, and in the end he had to resort to cutting them off with scissors. It would have been much easier for him, and less painful for the dogs, if he had trimmed their ears beforehand.

Burs and other hard-to-remove debris are not the only things that long hair on dogs like spaniels masks. The length of the fur is no deterrent to ticks either, which are much harder to find, and extricate, on an excessively hairy dog.

The solution is simple — get the clippers out, or book a visit to the groomer.

Remove spaniel feathers for an easier life