Shihpoo Grooming: The Flat Face, the Eyes and the Coat

A flat faced skull carries the eye in a shallow socket, so the eye sits forward and shows more of its surface than a long muzzled dog's does. Vets group that whole picture under one name, brachycephalic ocular syndrome: prominent eyes, long eyelid openings, sometimes a blink that does not quite close, and reduced feeling in the cornea itself.

That last part is the one that matters at grooming time. On a dog like this, hair resting on the surface of the eye is not a cosmetic problem. It is a scratch waiting to happen, and the dog may not feel it enough to blink it away.

The numbers behind that come from a study of more than a hundred thousand dogs in England, which found flat faced breeds carried over eleven times the risk of corneal ulcers compared with other dogs, and crossbred dogs sat at lower risk than purebreds. A Shihpoo is a cross, and plenty of them inherit a longer muzzle than their Shih Tzu parent, so most start out better placed than the parent breed. Better placed is not the same as safe, and we treat every short muzzled Shihpoo as if the eye needs the room.

Most Shihpoos we groom sit in the middle, in a soft open wave that is cottony in the hand and parts down to the skin with a little encouragement. It is a lovely coat and it hides something.

Where fine straight hair from one parent runs through curl from the other, the straight hair slides down and gathers at the base of the curl, flat against the skin. You can brush the top of a coat like that every single day and still find a pad of felt at skin level, usually on the ribs behind the elbow and across the lower chest. It is the most common thing we find on a Shihpoo that arrives looking beautifully kept, and it is the reason we ask owners of this cross to brush with a comb in the other hand.

The test takes ten seconds. Part the coat across the middle of the back, set the comb in at the skin, and draw it straight out. If it leaves the skin freely and only catches near the tips, the coat is in better shape than it looks. If it stops dead at the skin, the pad is already there and the rest of the brushing is decoration.

The Shih Tzu is slightly longer than it is tall, with short legs and a broad chest, and a Shihpoo usually keeps a good deal of that outline even with a Poodle parent to lengthen the leg. Most of the ones on our table stand somewhere between 23 and 30cm at the shoulder and weigh between four and eight kilos. That puts the belly coat two or three fingers off the grass, which is close enough to collect everything the grass has to offer.

One more belongs to this cross in particular. A Shihpoo spends part of every day in somebody's arms, and the coat on the chest and under the front legs gets rubbed in one direction while the dog is held. That is friction, the same as a harness line is friction, and it leaves the same flat patches. We are not suggesting you carry your dog less. Just comb the chest when you put them down.

Any knot that goes into the water comes out tighter and bigger. Wet hair swells, curl contracts as it dries, and the fine straight hair from the Shih Tzu side settles even further down into whatever it was already sitting in. So the comb comes out before the bath, not after it.

Then there is the drying itself. A short muzzled dog sheds heat through panting less efficiently than a long muzzled one, and research on dogs in UK veterinary practices found flat faced breeds at higher risk of heat related illness. A long stretch under warm moving air is not a neutral event for a dog built that way.

So we dry a short muzzled Shihpoo differently. Shorter stints, cooler air, the dog off the table between them, water offered, and someone watching the breathing rather than the clock. If that means the appointment runs twenty minutes longer, it runs twenty minutes longer. Tell us when you book if your Shihpoo has a very short muzzle or has struggled with heat before, and we will plan the day around it.

At home the same logic applies in a smaller way. Comb the coat through before it goes anywhere near water, dry it properly rather than letting the dog drip dry on the couch, and comb again once it is dry right the way through. A wavy or curly Shihpoo left to air dry is the quickest way to create a mat that was not there in the morning.

If you want the full step by step with pictures, our guide to brushing a Cavoodle at home uses the same method on a very similar coat. And if you find a knot you are not sure about, our guide to getting mats out without shaving sets out where we draw the line.

A short muzzle holds a full set of teeth in less jaw, so they crowd, overlap and sit at angles that trap food. Crowded teeth collect more plaque than evenly spaced ones, and small dogs already lose more teeth to gum disease than big dogs do. A soft brush along the outside surfaces most days is worth far more than a big effort once a month, and it is much easier to start while your Shihpoo is young and still thinks everything is a game. What we do is teeth cleaning, not dentistry, so anything loose, broken, bleeding or smelling strongly is a conversation with your vet.