To furminate or not to furminate?

I didn't want to hijack another post with my specific questions so hear goes... I have read a lot about the furminator in posts and just watched the video online. The questions I have are:

Does the furminator just take out the lighter colored fuzzy undercoat and leave the top coat which is darker and shinier? Or does it just thin the whole thing?

Also in the videos the woman is using the furminator from front to back and I thought I read somewhere to go from back to front. Which do you do?

I would really like to get something for Teddy's fur as he has lots of fluffy undercoat coming in along with his super long ruby fur.
Thanks for your help!

Teddy had an aweful shedding puppy coat. He is mainly white and I think white hairs shed more than the other colours (you can see them more clearly on furnishings, but I seem to gather more white hairs on combs, from all the boys). As soon as you picked him up, you were covered in little hairs which were a real job to remove.

I mentioned this, on another forum and was given the following tip by a very experienced judge/breeder:

Use a metal comb and thread a broad elastic band in and out of the teeth from one end to the other, leaving the rest of the band stretched across the other side of the comb.

This is an excellent and cheap way of removing puppy hair and is also good on dead adult hair.

I use the furminator on the undersides of their ear flaps and around the hidden area of their ear/neck where matting tends to occur. I, too, am concerned that it would cut/remove the top coat, so I use it to help prevent matting in hidden areas only. I haven't seen the video, so I can't comment on it. (I use thinning shears on the thick hair in front of their ears alongside their faces.)

I have found that our slicker brush works well to pull out dead hair/undercoat on our cavs. I closely watched a groomer using a slicker brush on a tiny maltese dog, so I understand how to use it without hurting my cavaliers, in fact they love their slicker brush!

In the past I preferred the Mars Coat King 10 or 12 blade for thinning hair on the body of a cavalier, so that's what I've used. It seems to pull the dead hair out from underneath, but it is a blade and will cut some of the coat.

I've gotten a bit lazy now, and I send my two thick-haired girls to a professional groomer (she breeds and shows cavaliers), and I'm not sure what she uses - I'm afraid to ask her to divulge her secrets!! She certainly makes them look better than I ever could!

In my experience (both dogs and cats), the furminator thins the coat. It supposedly only removes the dead loose hair, but I'm not sure if this is actually the case. The furminator is a stripping comb, just a big one with a fancy handle

Barbara Nixon said:

I mentioned this, on another forum and was given the following tip by a very experienced judge/breeder:

Use a metal comb and thread a broad elastic band in and out of the teeth from one end to the other, leaving the rest of the band stretched across the other side of the comb.

This is an excellent and cheap way of removing puppy hair and is also good on dead adult hair.

Click to expand...

Thanks so much!!! I used this method this morning and my Teddy looks like a new boy. I got a lot of the fluffy coat out and the dead fur from the underside of his ears! He, however, was not impressed with it I then used some Plush Puppy mousse on him and he looks great. With more of the lighter fluffy coat out he looks darker ruby.
No furminator for this boy...

I used the furminator on both of my dogs and both of my cats. It took off little hair on my blehemian and tons on my tri-color... who doesn't have as full of a coat as the blehemian as he is just 5 months. I didn't notice any difference really in how their coat looked. If it thinned it out it didn't do it too much... and both of my dogs loved it. The cats however... hated it, but boy did it take off tons of their fur!

I don't thing it thins their coat since I only seem to to find dead hair removed. My cats and dog love it. I really doesn't take much out of Maverick's coat cause it's still really thin/fine but works well on his ears. I might try the rubberband trick on his body.