Hey guys,

on another forum,kurzhaar.us, there is a discussion about white nails. From what I have seen in dogs with white nails is that they are more easily broken or splintered then the dark nails.

Anyone notice this?

Francine

Interesting.  I had never heard this before.  None of my gang has white nails and they are all tough.  Belle's in particular are big and tough.  I always thing of bear claws when I am trimming her nails.  The other two have much smaller nails.  Of course, they are also younger.

I have ZERO interest in getting involved in this arguement, lol. A quick dig through the archives on sleddogcentral should be sufficient proof, although they can certainly ask the question and get edjumacated quickly by folks much wiser and experienced than I!

Feet DO toughen up with proper diet and conditioning to a certain extent, but it's back to that ol' nature-vs-nurture thing... good care just can't reverse truely bad genes.

And just to add another twist: there are certainly well gaited dogs with weak nails/feet, but if everything else is equal a dog that's 'light on it's feet' will simply pound their running gear less.

FWIW this white vs color foot thing has been around in horse circles as well. My observation is that a white pony hoof will almost always be tougher than a dark TB hoof.

Juno's nails are all dark and appear to be very tough and have never broken or splintered. His dark nails do seem to grow at a record rate.

We do not clip as it is just a huge battle and as they are dark in colour it is easier to grind. Grinding seems to work well. We grind almost every other day and within 2 days the nails are clickin on the floor again. Granted we aren't grinding off too much at a time ((maybe 1/16 of an inch every couple of days) but it just seems like they are growing very quickly. I have always been going to paint to poor guys toenails some bright colour so that I could actually see how fast they are growing....maybe I will go and do that right now while I'm thinking of it.

I actually asked a couple horse shoers that did our horses about the white vs other thing. They said there may be a difference, but it was swamped by the vast differences they'd observed between individuals.

And they were saying this as they put shoes on the cute little white hooved welsh/arab crosses who we put a brazillion miles on hauling kids down asphalt roads... they never came up lame, the nails always held well, and when the shoes came off there was usually just a bunch of clean holes and sufficient growth to put the next set of shoes on without hassle.

We had a handful of dark-hooved TBs that were not nearly so easy. The shoers would end up mixing quite a bit of some kind of pinkish expoxy 'bondo' to shore up their brittle hoof wall and working around the old set of nail holes was tough because the hoof grew so slowly. When shoes came off they often took hunks of the hoof wall with the nails, requiring more expoxy again the next time 'round. Needless to say, these horses required a lot more care to keep from laming up, especially if we were riding a lot of roads.

My guys do mostly off-road running around, but sometimes we do walk on paved roads.

Both my GSP and the Lab (thankfully!!) had their declaws removed. My parents French Bulldog that they adopted has his. He has ripped them off several times running around. They try and keep them as trimmed as possible.