Review: Pleasantly Surprised by PediPaws

I’m not one for ordering things off of television. Not since the baseball card debacle of 2001. You see, my “as seen on TV” dreams were dashed after a long night at the bar when I came home to an infomercial concerning baseball cards.

Waxing nostalgic about my baseball-card-collecting youth, I picked up the phone and slurred my Visa number to the pretty-sounding girl on the other end and proceeded to go to bed confident I was going to receive mint-condition, original cards in a matter of days. In fact, I was surprised twice, first when I receive baseball cards in the mail, because I’d forgotten that I’d ordered them, and secondly that, low and behold, there wasn’t an original Mickey Mantle in the bunch!

So, after returning the fraudulent product, I mean, really, who else is going to be ordering baseball cards at 3:00 a.m. besides barhoppers?, I vowed never to order another item off the television.

That has held true ever since. When I saw the advertisement for PediPaws, a pet nail trimming product, I laughed it off as a gimmick. Although I have heard of people using dremmel tools to file down their dogs’ nails, I was confident this was just another mint-condition Mickey Mantle hoax.

The problem is, it did kind of make sense; it’s just a dressed up dremmel tool, and my dogs feet were starting to resemble talons more than canine paws. It’s my own fault, really. If you pay plenty of attention to your dog’s feet and nails and stay on top of cutting the hardened flesh, then your dog shouldn’t have an aversive reaction to having its nails cut. But, being busy with life, I kind of neglected desensitizing my dogs to nail-trimming time. I can get it done with a traditional clipper, but it’s like going 12 rounds in a mud pit with an alligator; and the Labrador is much worse than the bulldog.

So giving in, putting aside the baseball-card fiasco of ’01, I headed to the local Murdoch’s and bought a PediPaws ($20) and extra heads (10 for $10). I was still skeptical when I opened the package; the tool takes two C batteries and looks like something you might find in the back of a woman’s underwear drawer. Nevertheless, I inserted the batteries and started to work on the dogs.

Guess what? It worked! The dogs jerked away a bit but after a couple of passes with the PediPaws, they calmed down and let me file away. We’ve done a couple of short sessions tonight (like I said, their nails were long!) and the thing works. It’s slower than using clippers, but there isn’t the pressure and pain associated with clipping and there isn’t that fear of cutting into the quick–a big deal for those of us with black dogs when the quick isn’t visible. PediPaws also doesn’t cause the nails to splinter, a problem I’ve had with clippers.

I’m not trying to sound like an online infomercial, but I’m seriously impressed. Not only does it make trimming long nails easier, it should keep maintanence easy; with traditional clippers you have to wait until the nail is long enough to trim, with the PediPaws you can stay on top of keeping them short and give touch-ups now and then.

If you and your dog hate nail-trimming time, give PediPaws a shot. If it doesn’t work, you can always take it back!