Feeding – Monitoring Puppy’s Food Intake
With an average size litter it is important that puppies gain weight daily. If this doesn’t happen, you have to start to worry and spend time making sure that the underweight puppy gets his fair share.
With a singleton litter weighting daily is also important but for a different reason. Gaining too much weight too quickly can cause problems. There is plenty of milk available and no competition from littermates. With this unlimited supply of milk the puppy can become too chubby which will make it more difficult for the puppy to support her weight as she grows.
Echo’s puppy is my chubby monkey. She doubled her birth weight on day six – two days earlier than the record from my previous litters of day eight. So, the past few days have been spent by the whelping box limiting the puppy’s nursing time. It has helped slow the puppy’s weight gain some. This will be something that I will continue to do.
Exercise is an important part of puppy development. Newborn puppies crawl on their tummy pulling with their front legs and pushing with their back legs. As the days and weeks pass, their muscles become stronger and eventually they are strong enough to support their bodies by walking on all fours. Singleton puppies development is delayed as they do not get as much exercise as puppies with littermates.A singleton puppy doesn’t get exercise as they nurse; she just leisurely nurses without littermates pushing her off. I have to step in and add exercise. I will stop her nursing, move her to the other side of the whelping box so that she will have to crawl back. To mimic littermates to crawl over, we added stuffed toys, a bolster bed, and blanket for her to crawl over. This will help strengthen her muscles.When raising a normal size litter of puppies, exercise is something that happens without any work on my part. Puppies rush to their mama and fight for position as they nurse. All this action is a normal form of exercise and puppies get stronger with no help from me.
Handling puppies is something that we like to do from day one. Our puppies get lots of cuddles, love and attentions from young and old. Singleton litter or average size litters doesn’t matter – we love to cuddle puppies. Echo’s puppy may have a bonus in this area- one puppy and so many people to cuddle her
Singletons have a lot against them. Only 50% live. It starts in utero, they get bigger, like a fish that grows to the size of its bowl, so they are harder to get out. Sometimes one puppy is not enough to provide the needed hormones to make the dam go into labor. If you have not done an x-ray or an ultrasound, this may come on you unexpectedly; this is why I ALWAYS do an x-ray. A singleton can also risk the life of your dam.
Sassy the Mastiff mom is howling for her puppy. I put him on Sassy, and he got 8 grams of milk. WOW unbelievable! Grin! Her milk is finally in on the back two teats.
Since there is only one puppy, I am using only the back four teats, and not the other five. I hope the others dry up. I have marked the four back teats with a Sharpie: A, B, C, D, and I will rotate him on these ones. If I let all nine nipples come active, apparently I am asking for mastitis, as there is no way he can keep up to draining all nine. By one week old, I discovered, I should have only worked on the back two.
Meet MistyTrails Soltero of Czar (Saul). He is VERY vocal and lively with a good set of lungs. He has a very dark muzzle and is quite handsome and manly. There was only one Mastiff pup born this time. This is going to be quite different than Sassys 11 puppies born last litter. I thought, BONUS, this will be a piece of cake, but NO, it is just as hard. And very frustrating.
By keeping the singleton Mastiff puppy with the Havanese litter, it gives the Mastiff pup all of the stimulation and warmth he needs from the other puppies. Not to mention the care the mommy Havanese dam is giving him. The pups and dam do not know they are different breeds. To them, they are all one happy family.
However, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop or for the wheels to fall off! Surely at some point we were going to have problems? After all, Cruz was only weaned at about 12 weeks because his mom really didn’t seem to be bothered by him suckling! What was his frustration tolerance going to be like? How would he cope if another dog got annoyed with him or as he became an adolescent and his hormones gave him even more confidence?
Once my training school opened again in the New Year, Cruz began attending and he also started puppy class at the Rottweiler Club. By that stage he was also going for walks in popular dog walking areas and meeting lots of people, dogs and kids and seeing surfboards, people in wet suits, skateboards and bicycles. Cruz really took everything in his stride. He never had a cross word with another puppy and was outgoing and friendly to everyone he met.
As Cruz grew more competent at moving around, I started increasing the challenges that he faced each day. I made an effort not to “molly-coddle” him, but allowed him to find his own way when walking with the dogs out in the garden and following us back up the path inside. He had to learn to navigate boardwalks, stone steps and various surfaces when he was just beginning to walk and see where he was going!
Despite all of this, I was still worried about the future and I was convinced that Cruz was already “lonely” and crying at times because he did not have siblings to cuddle up to! Very silly I know, seeing as he had never known any different and was not capable of any real social or emotional behaviour at that point!
I am still in awe of how gentle she was with him and how accommodating, but “instructive” the play between Rosie and Cruz became. At the same time, Cruz also started interacting with our big boy, Judah, and so learned that there were other dogs around too who he had to be a little more respectful of than his mom. Judah was incredibly sweet with him and really very excited about having a new puppy in the home.