The coat that looks like it should be clipped but shouldn't
Coco is a nine-year-old Field Spaniel - a rarer breed - but that's changing. The breed is slowly building numbers in Australia, and the groomer who hasn't encountered one yet probably will.
The problem when they do arrive is the coat. Field Spaniels have a combination coat - silky feathering, a dense undercoat, and a top coat over the jacket that looks, to the uninitiated, like it wants to be clipped. It doesn't. Clip the jacket and you'll change the texture permanently, lose the colour, and produce a result that has nothing to do with what this breed is supposed to look like. The correct approach is to card out the undercoat and hand pluck the jacket - and if the dog is desexed, to do it more often than you might expect, because desexed dogs grow coat significantly faster than entire dogs.
Tiarne Perkiss works through Coco's complete groom and unpacks why each decision is made the way it is.
The expression is everything
Field Spaniels should have a soft expression, and the way you achieve that is by leaving the face and muzzle alone. No clipping. The ears get the clipper - top third, number ten blade, blended rather than hard-lined - and the throat is clipped to about a finger's width above the breastbone. But the face stays as it is. Take that softness away and you've changed the dog.
What the feathering is supposed to do
The feathering on a Field Spaniel should fall off the back of the leg. Not the front, not the side - the back. It's easy to miss when the dog is standing still, which is why Tiarne checks from the front before moving on. When the feathering is falling from the wrong place, the whole silhouette reads differently and the dog loses the flowing, natural outline the breed is known for.
The underline follows the dog's natural contours rather than any imposed shape. The feet are trimmed to a neat cat foot. Tiarne's practical rule at the end of the groom - get the dog to sit on the table and check the underline from that angle before it leaves - is the kind of thing you only learn from doing it.
Tiarne’s complete masterclass with Coco is available to Members inside igroomhub, or you can rent it for six weeks on igroomschool.
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