Posts tagged "dog grooming competition"

A white poodle is dyed yellow, blue and green, and made to resemble a peacock (photo left). A chow chow's fur is trimmed and carved to look like a lion with a zebra's head emerging from its hind leg (photo below). Have you stumbled upon an alternate universe? Well, kind of.

Welcome to the the world of "creative grooming" competitions, in which professional dog groomers transform mundane-looking canines into fantastical creatures. It's an art form that has its detractors, but with the New York Times interested, and a reality television show in the works, creative dog grooming appears to be gaining in popularity.

We know it strikes a chord with Paw Nation readers because after first running the photo gallery in August 2009, and then running more recent photos last week, you demanded to know even more about this very special kind of dog competition.

The trend began with professional groomer Jerry Schinberg of Des Plaines, Ill. Schinberg held the first-ever "regular" dog grooming competition in 1973, and is credited with introducing the notion of creative grooming in 1980. "I got the idea from going to beauty shows for hairstyling for women," Schinberg tells Paw Nation.

Today, there are more than a dozen different creative grooming contests that are held each year across the country, usually as part of a larger, regular grooming competition. While the prize money for winning a regular grooming contest can be in the tens of thousands, the amount awarded for creative grooming is far less, usually about $1,500. So why do it? "It's fun, and an artistic outlet, and a way of bonding with my dog," groomer Sandra Hartness tells Paw Nation.

Without a doubt, one of the most talked about posts Paw Nation ran in its first year was this gallery of creatively groomed poodles shot for the U.K. Daily Mail by animal photographer Ren Netherland. The photos document some of the weird and wild styles found at creative grooming shows, a particular subset of dog grooming/dog shows that features poodles cut and dyed to resemble -- well, almost anything. According to the Daily Mail, it takes just two hours for the dogs to be transformed.

We received a vocal response to the gallery when we first ran it. Some of our readers loved it, while others hated it. Some thought the dogs looked were sweet, adorable, and fun, while others were outraged by what they saw as humiliating, degrading, and abusive to animals. But no matter what each reader thought, almost everyone had a strong opinion!

As part of our birthday celebration, we thought we'd bring you twelve new shots of dogs styled as giraffes, horses and more along with those original twelve shots that caused such an uproar! Be sure to tell us what you think.

Forget the slot machines! Tammy Colbert hit the jackpot by perfectly grooming a miniature schnauzer named Cece. The California resident bested 35 other expert groomers in the two-hour competition at the pet goods trade show SuperZoo, taking home $20,000 -- the world's largest prize in the history of dog grooming contests.

Colbert, who runs Wildwynd, a mobile grooming business in Huntington Beach, Calif., told Paw Nation, "They kept reading off the names and when they got down to fifth, [I] started crying. And then I won and it was just surreal that it even happened."

The prize money, furnished by the World Wide Pet Industry Association, is a long way from Colbert's first grooming competitions back in the mid-1980s. Back then, she said, winners received prizes like a gallon of shampoo and a plaque.

"People could hardly believe it that there was going to be this much money," event coordinator Janice Fehn told Paw Nation. "This is the biggest money ever, ever, ever offered."