🐾 Clean dog's paws after walk - tips for success

Cleaning your dog’s paws helps to keep them healthy

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February 9, 2021 11:44am EST

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Cleaning dirty paws made easy

With terrible weather comes the need to wipe a lot of wet, muddy paws. A lot of people have trouble wiping their dog’s feet because either the dog won’t stand still or constantly pulls their feet away while you are wiping them.
Here is a simple 3-step solution:

Step 1:
Teach your dog to shake a paw. Practice repeatedly until your dog willingly and happily puts each of his front feet, one at a time, in your hand when you ask and leaves it there for a couple of seconds.
You can teach him to give you his back feet much the same way you would teach him to give you his front feet.

Step 2:
Drape a towel over your hand. Continue to practice shake-a-paw as you did before but now ask for your dog’s paw with your hand covered by the towel. As tempting as it might be, DO NOT squeeze or wipe his feet right now.
Simply reward him for placing his foot on your towel-covered hand. Practice repeatedly with each foot until your dog is comfortable placing his paw on the towel and holding it there for several seconds.

Step 3:
Ask your dog to shake-a-paw with your towel-covered hand as you did in Step 2. Once he gives it to you, do a quick wipe (1-2 seconds) of the toes on that foot with the towel hand. Release his foot and reward him.
Repeat until he is comfortable with you handling each foot like this, and then gradually start to increase the time and even vigorousness of the foot wipe until you can do a proper wipe.

How long will this take? He may learn it in one – 10-minute session or it may take several training sessions repeated over several days or more.
Once he masters that, it is a very quick process to add in the other two steps.

Read dog training tips