Autumn - cold night and warm days, do you go to the groomers or not? Dogs come in all sorts of coats - they also have different grooming needs. What they don’t vary in is that they are susceptible to heat stroke and get matted if not brushed propery and efficiently. It sounds like a good idea to shave r cut short the coat of dogs in summer to keep them cool? But is that idea based in science or is it based on humans who think that dogs cool the same way we do? Humans cool by producing sweat from our biggest organ, the skin, and cool by the effect of evaporation of this perspiration as air moves across our skin. This system is controlled by a sweating centre in the brain. Dogs however have a panting centre which stimulates panting which is rapid shallow breathing that causes air to be passed through the nose and over the tongue allowing efficient evaporation to occur. The tongue has a rich blood supply and heat produced in the muscles and tissues enters the blood and is transported to the tongue. A dog’s nose maximises this process due to its many tissue folds that increase the surface area the air can come in contact with and body heat is reduced. Dogs also have sweat glands in their feet and ears; however they are not as efficient and play a very small role in thermo-regulation. A dog’s fur acts as insulation both against heat and cold, ... functioning much like the insulation in the roof or walls of your house. It keeps in warm air AND COOL air as required. Their skin has a number of hairs growing through each follicle with a guard hair that is normally longer than the others. Dog’s piloerect (raise these guard hairs) by contracting or lengthening muscle fibres therefore insulating against cold and heat with degree of insulation increasing with fur thickness. The natural seasonal shedding in summer and winter is the dog’s way of dealing with the amount of hair required to cope with varying temperature demands but only if the dog is kept well groomed. Dog’s also utilise behavioural adaptations to handle heat, resting in the heat of the day and being more active at dusk and dawn. Biophysics, (Newton’s law of cooling), provides a formula for measuring temperature at the tip of a hair and temperature at the surface of the skin and this estimates the ability of hair to conduct heat. Studies show that dogs with longer hair have less heat at the skin than those with shorter hair. If you surgically clip with a short blade such as a 10 or 30 the number becomes dangerously high. Hence educated groomers will attempt to find a happy medium between clipping short and clipping off half the length of the coat using snap on combs. If the dog’s coat is heavily matted and removed and the night time temperature decreases then the dog will be losing skin heat i.e. becoming hypothermic. A matted coat impedes the dog’s ability to vary the length of the hair (piloerection) and the mats also alter the dog’s ability to dump heat from their skin surface to the outside air, thereby causing heat stress. Therefore dogs that heat stress do so not because of the length of the coat but due to the coat holding unwanted loose hair.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 08:08:16 +0000
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