Pet vacuum device runs comb over bad hair days

NET RESULTS:The follicles that fall from your cats and dogs can now be sucked up with a special attachment, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON

NOW AND again, technology goes to the dogs. Thank goodness.

For as anyone who owns a hairy friend knows, while a dog can bring enjoyment of the best possible kind over many years, there are a few compromises to be made as well. And if a little geek know-how can address those, all the better for us and for them.

Perhaps it’s an indication – let’s be kind and not say a sad indication – of where my priorities lie that, while I got quite excited at the box Microsoft recently sent out with a tester of its new Kinect motion–operated game controller, I was even more thrilled to have a little package from Dyson which contained its latest product, called Groom.

Groom is a complex (20 patents apparently pending) yet simple implementation of something for which dog owners have secretly longed ever since those first wolves decided it was more interesting to hang around the edges of Stone Age encampments and scrounge a few spare bones.

I’m sure it wasn’t long before those shaggy canids were insinuating themselves inside the caves and huts, lounging about on the Stone Age equivalent of sofas and beds, and leaving a trail of hair in their wake.

Fortunately for our Stone Age forebears, they were dressed in furs and skins anyway, so a little extra hair about the place was not ruining a chic all-black outfit by accenting it with gazillions of stray wisps. Nonetheless, I am sure they would have been delighted not to raise small clouds of dog hair every time they sat down.

And back then, as now, dog hair is distinctly overrated as a food condiment.

Hence, my excitement at the arrival of Groom, a dog-grooming attachment that attaches to a Dyson vacuum and enables you to brush your dog without ending up with a two-inch layer of hair on the floor. Instead, it gets sucked directly into the vacuum as you brush.

Oh, joy! I regularly confess to people that my Dyson Animal vacuum is one of my favourite gadgets.

It extracts animal hair from carpets, crevices, and furniture like nothing else I have used, and all the disgusting evidence is there to be seen in the clear canister after a good vacuuming session.

I hasten to add that, in the realm of those who spend much of their lives with animals, it’s not just me that gets overly excited by their Dyson, either.

I was in visiting my vet last week – with a cat, for a change – and the subject of Dysons came up. My vet grew visibly excited. “I would attack anybody who tried to take ours out of here,” he said.

“I would rank it as one of the most important pieces of equipment we have in the surgery, along with the stethoscope.”

It made me laugh, but I know what he means. So I couldn’t wait to try a Dyson attachment that is actually designed to capture hair before it comes off the dog rather than dealing with the aftermath of what happens when gravity meets hair follicle.

So what is Groom? It’s a quite cleverly designed wire slicker brush that can be used on medium-to-long-haired dogs. It attaches on to the flexible hose part of your Dyson. In the centre of the brush is an oval opening through which the hair is sucked into the vacuum.

What’s smart about it is that the slicker brush part is actually retracted behind a perforated plastic panel. The brush extrudes if you push down with your thumb on the top of the device. When you let go, the bristles go back behind the panel and the hair is freed and is drawn into the oval.

A lot of people might think their dog will hate this because of the age-old animosity between dogs and vacuums. But I had no problem using it on any of my vacuum-hating Cavalier King Charles spaniels. The actual canister of the vacuum sits at a distance to the Groom brush, and none of them seem to mind the distant noise.

But if you do have a dog that is bothered by the noise, you can turn the vacuum off and brush the dog until the bristles are full of hair, then turn the vacuum on to suck up the hair, turn it off and resume grooming.

The Groom brush surface is a little bit on the large side for my small dogs, but still works quite well. A friend and I tried it on a very large Alsatian, and it worked an absolute treat. This is a dog that produces enough hair to stuff a cushion after a single grooming and to have it all vanish straight into the vacuum inspired my friend to go off and buy one himself.

You could also use it on a cat, although I’ve always found they tend to have an even greater aversion to a running vacuum cleaner than a dog.

On the other hand, I know somebody with dogs and cats who vacuums them with a Dyson furniture tool, and they seem to enjoy it. He’s already excited at the prospect of a proper attachment for the job. But probably not as relieved as his dogs and cats will be.

The Dyson Groom is €44.95 and works with most Dyson models.