Twice a year a double-coated dog will drop enough undercoat to fill a carrier bag, and the fur you do not pull out ends up on the sofa, in the car and eventually knotted against the skin. Most of that is preventable with ten quiet minutes a week. The point of a tool like this is not to strip the coat but to take out the dead layer underneath before it has a chance to felt.

Fine pins reach past the top coat and lift the loose undercoat out, easing knots apart rather than tearing through them, and the rounded tips are there so the pins skate over skin instead of scratching it. The self-cleaning button is the part that changes how the job feels: a full brush stops working, so instead of picking a mat of hair out of the pins every thirty seconds, you press once, the pins retract and the fur lifts straight off.

• Fine pins that lift loose undercoat and ease out tangles
• Rounded tips designed to protect the skin
• One-touch self-cleaning button retracts the pins to release trapped fur
• Suits short, medium and long coats
• Works on cats as well as dogs
• Two colours: blue or green

Worth knowing. Those are not the same tool, and rather than pick whichever reads better we would rather say so.

Who it's for: Owners of heavy shedders who want the dead undercoat out weekly without the stop-start of picking hair off a clogged brush.