Cairn Terrier grooming in Gloucester, MA

The breed standard asks for a hard, weather-resisting double coat: a profuse, harsh outer coat over a short, soft, close undercoat. It lists silkiness and curliness as faults and permits only a slight wave. The AKC describes the finished dog as small, shaggy and alert, with head, tail and ears up. A Cairn of 13 or 14 pounds and about 10 inches is not supposed to look sculpted, and a cut that turns it into a different terrier misses the point of the breed.

The coat came from the work. The AKC explains that a cairn was a mound of stones marking a boundary or a grave, that rodents lived in and under them, and that the Cairn Terrier was developed to dig in and rout them out. A hard jacket sheds rain, grit and thorns. On a Gloucester dog the same coat copes with a wet March, but it still traps burrs from the trail edges and still needs its dead hair taken out, by stripping or by brushing and trimming.

The AKC calls Cairns generally easy keepers and gives no fixed interval, so the dog tells you. The signs are long hair on the ear tips that softens the pricked look, feet that have grown into slippers, a tail that has turned feathery and hair over the eyes that hides the expression. Book the full service then. Rebooking at pick-up takes $5 off, and if you prefer a regular rhythm, ask the groomer at check-in what interval suits your dog's coat.

What a skipped tidy costs depends on the comb. On a harsh coat the trouble spots are the softer head furnishings, the armpits and the hair behind the ears, especially under a collar or harness. Knots there are dematting, $15 per 20 minutes on top of the $75 full service, assessed at check-in. The weekly comb-out the AKC recommends anyway is what keeps that line off the bill.

A metal comb and a soft slicker brush, the two tools the AKC suggests, cover most of a Cairn's home care. Brush the jacket, then comb the head furnishings, the legs and behind the ears down to the skin. Loose dead hair often lifts out between finger and thumb as you go; the AKC's wire-coat guide calls this rolling the coat and suggests doing a little whenever you have a few minutes.

Cape Ann gives a Cairn's feet plenty to carry. Check between the pads after walks at Ravenswood or on the Dogtown Common trails, where burrs and ticks wait in the brush from April to November, and rinse off road salt after winter walks along Eastern Ave. Start young if you can: the AKC suggests regular grooming sessions with a new Cairn puppy to get it used to being handled, and our first-groom page explains how a puppy's first visit is paced.