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Unless your dog is one of those fancy, no-shedding breeds like a Portuguese Water Dog, your pet is likely to shed lots of hair all over your home and clothes.
This can drive even the most laidback pet-owners crazy. You could try to keep up with an aggressive cleaning regime and vacuum or sweep every day to keep the hair at bay — or you could try a de-shedding brush like the Furminator to help cut down on the amount of dog hair that ends up on your floors.
If you haven’t heard of it before, the Furminator is a dog-grooming tool that has a cult following on Amazon. It has a nearly perfect 4.7-star rating on the shopping site with almost 15,000 reviews.
Unlike a lot of other dog brushes that merely comb the surface of the hair, the Furminator bypasses a dog’s top coat to gently target loose undercoat hair with its stainless-steel tines. Our Editor-in-Chief, Genevieve Lill, says the Furminator was the only brush she’d use on her family’s shed-happy shepherd-Labrador mix.
“Of course it didn’t stop us from finding tumbleweeds of her hair around the house,” she says. “But the Furminator removed much more hair than any other brush we tried.”
If social media photos are any indication, the Furminator is extremely effective at removing loose hair.
Just take a look at this Instagram pic where the owner brushed out enough loose hair to make an image of the dog using the shed hair:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BykL3eMoQbJ/
And the golden retriever in this Instagram post is probably feeling a lot lighter after getting brushed with the Furminator:
https://www.instagram.com/p/B1EXH3VJ6uI/
The Furminator comes in multiple sizes to accommodate different dog breeds, from extra-small to giant, as well as options for short hair and long hair. (There is also a version designed specifically for cats.)
The price ranges from $19 for an extra-small model to over $50 for the giant version, so it’s certainly not the cheapest dog brush you could buy. However, if you want to avoid having to clean up dog hair (or Shedlings, as the company calls clusters of hair in the video below) from your home 24/7, it might be worth the cost.
Margeaux Baulch Klein is a freelance writer and digital strategist based in Los Angeles. She has written for publications like the Huffington Post, New York Daily News, Bustle, and HelloGiggles, among others. Visit Scripps News to see more of Margeaux's work. More.
