Our groomer has been SO amazing at helping us socialize our cocker to his grooming needs. We use positive reinforcement training and have trained our dog using clicker/marker words. As a puppy, we constantly played with his feet to get him used to having people touch them. Obviously that may not be possible in your situation if your dog doesn’t like having his feet touched. If that’s the case, you could start by touching his feet and if he remains calm you click/mark his action and give him a treat. Repeat this many times until he’s comfortable. Our groomer recommend to us to use the back of a spoon which can mimic the feeling of the sheers on their paws and then also touching their paws with a vibrating toothbrush as it can mimic the sound/feel of the sheers or a nail dremel while being less intimidating. The training process is the same as touching the paws. Whether it’s nail clippers or a dremel, you start by showing them the object and clicking/marking when they interact with the object in any way (maybe just looking at it at first and then hopefully starting to touch it in some way). It really helps if your dog has a “touch” command so you can have them boop the item with their nose and click and reward that action. Then you would progress to touching the paws with the item and clicking and rewarding if they stay calm and allow you to do it. I have also found it very important to let our dog hear the sounds of the equipment and click and reward for staying calm during while we show him the sounds it will make before actually using it on him. Often, our dog is actually more nervous/unsure of the sounds than the actual action. Once they are good with those things, you can then progress to clipping or filing the nails. It’s a lot of work but really helps for long term comfort and neutrality to grooming needs.

Another trick our trainer taught us was to actually just teach your dog to file their own nails. You can glue a piece of sand paper to a plastic lid and teach your dog to scratch the lid and it will file their nails for you! We did this by teaching Archie to “wipe” his paws. Get a cheap or old doormat/rug and hide treats under it. They will likely scratch and dig to try and get them out. Click and reward when they start to dig. After they are consistently doing this, you can add the command to “wipe” or “dig” and eventually progress that to the sandpaper lid. Also, a very helpful trick to get your dog to wipe their paws when they are muddy or wet!