Carefully desensitizing your dog to handling of the feet and the manipulation required to trim excess nail length makes things go easier for dog and owner alike. Not trimming nails will cause the nails to grow so long that the toe cannot function properly and will twist to the side - this may lead to arthritis and/or pain in a dog's feet.
Just because your dog allows you to handle his feet does not mean he'll accept the particular way you handle the feet, with clippers in hand. These are two very different things in a dog's mind. You must desensitize the dog to the specific way you hold and manipulate the foot and toes to trim nails. A detailed desensitization plan is presented in the blog entry "Modeling to Get Behaviors".
When using the clicker, or any other marker, to teach your dog to let you handle his feet and trim nails, many people try to click AS they are cutting. Click ends the behavior and the dog is correct if they jerk the foot away. Jerking the foot away increases the chance that you will hurt the dog (creating more anxiety) if the jerk happens while you are still cutting or about to cut. I recommend that you "click" a second or two after you make each cut to make it clear to your dog that calmly letting you continue to hold the foot is the behavior that is being reinforced.
Your dog's nails have a hard outer surface that surrounds and protects a pain sensitive blood vessel inside. Surrounding the blood vessel is a transition area that is also pain sensitive, but will not bleed if cut. If the nails are already long, the blood vessel has grown longer too. Trimming the hard outer shell and getting as close as possible to the transition area on more than one side will cause the blood vessel to pull back over time and allow you to get shorter nails. The best nail trimmer for this process is the red handled nail trimmers with the thinner blade.
As you trim nails, listen to the sound the cut makes. If there is a crisp clipping sound, you are in the hard outer nail and not close to the pain sensitive areas. If you hear a slicing sound, you are closer to or in pain sensitive areas. This sound is more evident when trimming the nails of larger dogs.
Yellow = hard nail
can bleed profusely when cut into.
White = pain sensitive transition area,
will not bleed
Blue = first cut
Green = second cut
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