Jennifer is the owner of Love Fur Dogs in Glencoe, Illinois, and was named Best Groomer in Chicagoland by the Chicago Tribune in 2015. Jennifer is an award winning educator and has been a Master Groomer since 1985. Jennifer is a retired schoolteacher who has dabbled in the dog show world for forty years, where she learned to groom. Jennifer founded the Illinois Professional Pet Groomers Association. She is the author of the acclaimed “Groomers Guide To The 15 Coat Types” seminars, and a poster and book of the same name. Her academically rich webinars can be found by visiting her website at www.groomersguide.com.
Ahere are two kinds of people in the world: those of us who are old enough to remember life before the internet and the rest of us who have never known life without it. Technology has revolutionized how we communicate with each other, and with…
“I always thought I was healthy, so I never got a primary care physician,” shares award-winning Virginia groomer Tiffany Tate-Croxford. “Instead, I had an excuse for every symptom, so I dismissed them. If I only had gotten a PCP and regular checkups, they would have…
Dog groomers don’t see breeds like Boxers, Doberman Pinschers, Bull Dogs or other mixed-breed smooth coats as often as we see doodles and other dogs with more hair. Some owners of these smooth-coated breeds mistakenly feel that their dogs don’t need grooming or even bathing.…
The pet industry has been emerging in recent decades to become a major economic presence. Groomers have grown from being somewhat of an underground economy to being a mainstream, high-profile, valued business and service. We welcome this emergence into the cultural and economic mainstream. However,…
Ahe religions that arose in the arid and ancient Middle East—Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam—all share some negative and ancient scriptural pronouncements regarding dogs and human interaction with them.1 Scholars speculate that these monotheistic traditions developed these religious teachings denouncing dogs for practical reasons.
For those of us who have been around for a few decades, taking a look back at how grooming used to be, we can say that the “good old days” don’t look all that good in the rear-view mirror when it comes to grooming technology…
Like everyone else in the world, COVID had a significant effect on pet groomers. Those of us fortunate to have survived the pandemic—the world’s worst in over a century—now live in a world with a severely changed global economy. It was hard for many of…
Remaining in the top 30 of the most popular breeds registered with the American Kennel Club, the Shetland Sheepdog—affectionately nicknamed the “Sheltie”—has every bit the brains and skills of the larger members of the Herding group, but in a much more manageable size. And while…
I was just over 10 years old the first time my Grandpa Wilbur Bishop took me to the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. Traveling to South Dakota also meant driving through the expansive tribal grasslands of the Rosebud Sioux Reservation that fills much of the…
Over the 45 years that I have been a dog groomer, I have noticed that some of the most important things I have learned are short, random, simple, clear truths that I find myself repeating over and over to clients, co-workers and to myself in…
We see it everywhere at grooming competitions or in the dog show ring: beautifully hand-stripped wire-coated dogs. Hand stripping empowers the naturally rich pigment and characteristic hard texture of this most distinctive dog coat type to function just as designed, which is to keep their…
It goes without saying that cat grooming is different than dog grooming. And while a lot of the differences are widely accepted, some of the most important differences in grooming cats are not obvious or even visible because they are anatomical, involving microscopic differences in…