Neverland-Retrievers

From the beginning, we’ve realized that Wendy could not feed and attend to all 12 puppies together. For the first week we tried separating the puppies based on sex, because the males are generally born large and stronger they will push the girls off a teat. This seemed to work well at first, but the boys nursed to long which meant Wendy needed time to recover before the girls could be placed in the whelping box. It was apparent after a few days of low weight gain that we needed a change. On day 6, we started timing the duration each group spent in the whelping box, giving them 4 hours in/out. During the four hours the puppies would usually nurse twice. Most puppies improved their weight gain significantly.

The down side of keeping the puppies out of the whelping box is cleanliness. Either at the beginning or near the end of their stay in the holding box, the puppies will have a bowel movement. We usually don’t notice until its to late and the puppy is covered in its last meal. I am a strong believer that a clean puppy will be a healthy puppy. So we spend quite a bit of time washing the puppies with a damp cloth, drying them, replacing the linen in the holding box and cleaning the box itself. The cycle is repeated every four hours. As a side note, our washing machine has been going almost non-stop since the puppies arrived. This piece of equipment is the most important item we have in our house right now.

This process of switching the puppies and cleaning up, goes on all day and night. For the most part, I cover the early morning, evenings and nighttime. My darling wife, Deb, covers the morning and afternoon times while I’m at work. I envision this going on for another week and a half until we start weaning the puppies.

Since the puppies are now almost two weeks old, I am considering putting all 12 in the whelping box together for a day to see how things go. I may try that this weekend, so stay tuned.

P

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 28th, 2011 at 9:38 am and is filed under D-Litter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.