Our now 9 month old female Doberman came home with us at 8 weeks old.
We immediately started handling her feet, tapping on her nails with clippers and otherwise working regularly with getting her comfortable with our handling.
At about 12 weeks, during an ear taping consult with a very experienced Dobe person, the Expert offered to do nails and proceeded to do a very aggressive nail grind with heavy restraint (unfortunately, we were party to this).
The Expert pronounced our girl's "acceptance" of this apparent test a sign of her good temperament.
Since that time, we have been unable to proceed with any real trimming, despite starting from scratch w/ desensitization handling sessions.
We daily handle and massage her feet (just finished 3 weeks of healing for lacerations / avulsions on several of her front foot pads, Mushers wax applications daily, etc.)
Our girl is good with all of this and remains relaxed through all sorts of handling, eg typically allows us to remove anything we find between her toes/pads after walks, etc.
When the tools come out, however, it's game on.
She has never reacted aggressively, but clearly goes into high arousal escape mode when a move is made to bring the tool to the foot.
At this point, our girl's nails are approaching the point of being hazardous for her and us and need to be worked on to keep them in the ballpark, at the very least.
I don't want to give up on eventually handling this task myself, but am considering taking our girl in to our vet to get a nail intervention.
I would appreciate any feedback from experienced people who have also addressed this "up against the wall" predicament.
