Quick question on shaving our ALD

[Doug and Beth]

Our Australian Labradoodle will be turning 1 next week and he is the best thing in the world!

 

He has the most amazing wave fleece coat which is exactly what we wanted!

 

However he is hot when outside and we feel bad for the little guy.  If we decide to shave him for the summer is there any risk that his wavy fleece coat will not grow back in the exact way it is now?

 

Thanks for all your help folks!

[Jane, Guinness and Murphy]

I was asking my trainer when he thought it was too hot to walk the Doods....on Tuesday it was mid 90's and humid, and I didn't walk them because of the heat.  He said that he's found the "double coated" dogs are the ones who seem to have the biggest problem with heat.  His thought was that it should not be a problem with the Doods because their skin is "breathing" with their coat type.  I asked him if I thought that they were cooler with the shorter cut and his feeling was that it didn't matter that much as long as they were not matted (Karen's point).  Clearly he's no expert on this, but his thought on single coated versus double coated dogs makes some sense to me.

[Karen, Jasper and Jackdoodle]

The point about the matting can't be emphasized enough. It's very, very hard to be sure that there are no matts in a dog's coat, especially if the hair is very long or thick. With my past dogs, I tried my best, but the groomer often found something I had missed, usually in a hard-to-reach place like the axilla. So that right there would be an explanation of why some dogs seem to be cooler when they are shaved; it's very likely their coats were matted to some degree before they were shaved.

[Karen, Jasper and Jackdoodle]

Ben's reasoning is as good as any, I think.

To guess at an answer to Adina's question, maybe, on a dog with short trimmed but not shaved hair, the air closer to the skin, under the hair, get cooled off faster when the dog comes inside into the air-conditioning, because the colder air can flow to those areas faster?

But that wouldn't explain why your friend's shaved dog pants less, if in fact she really does.

I really do think a lot of the feelings we attribute to our dogs (the dog is happy, lonely, feels cooler, etc) are really projections of our own feelings. It just seems to us, psychologically, that we would feel cooler wearing a light linen jacket than we would wearing a big heavy fur coat, so we project that onto our dog. I think sometimes, subconsciously, we see what we want to see.

[Lisa, Daisy & Dexter]

Daisy pants so much and for so long either way I can't tell the difference. But I do think her stamina is greater when she is shorter (she doesn't get so heated so fast), also my groomer "thins" her coat quite a bit when she is cut.