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With many long coated dog breeds, you've got double coat, you'll have an undercoat which is soft and you'll have an outer coat which is typically a little harder, it's a little bit longer. The undercoat is typically the part of the coat that causes the matts. It's when the undercoat wants to come out that it falls into the coat and bunches up into matts. So it's really the undercoat that we need to keep brushed, brushed through. What is undercoat? How do I recognize undercoat? How do I know if my dog has a lot of undercoat? We're working with briards here. There are certainly briards with more or less undercoat. This particular one that we're working with has a ton of undercoat and you can see it's the fluffy stuff it's the fine fluffy stuff. You can see how thick, if her hair is just sitting like this her hair is pretty thick down to her skin. So she has a lot of undercoat and it's this fine cottony stuff under here and that's the stuff that causes the matting, that's the part that 's important to brush through. There's different tools you can use to get some of that undercoat out. You can use a V-rake to try to pull some of that undercoat out. We can also use a shedding blade to try to get out some of that undercoat. You need to do it in a consistent way working it one piece at a time. You only want to work when the undercoat is brushed through. You notice that I didn't rip the shedding blade all the way down to the end, I'm just working in the top 2 to 3 inches here. I'm getting the undercoat you can see it now, it's been lifted out and it's now in amongst the outer coat. I take my pin brush here and I remove the undercoat. Again, the undercoat is the challenging part with dogs with lots of undercoat. You're going to have to spend more time keeping them brushed out, keeping that undercoat combed through. Important, they might have a lot of undercoat from puppy hood all the way to adulthood or it might be something that changes when they're an adult. But you want to get in the habit of brushing it through now.

Elise McMahon,