Archive for October 19th, 2017

FOUR WEEKS OLD!

Thursday, October 19th, 2017

Since a certain puppy whose name rhymes with “schmorson” ESCAPED today (there’s always one who’s the first over the wall, this time it was Orson on their four week birthday!), we are in the process of hustling to build them their new digs in the living room. If all goes according to plan, they’ll have a 6 x 8 pen with a window view through the sliding doors into the yard! This will also make visiting easier. Since Zhora is still feeding them regularly (although I am getting the feeling that the bitey teeth are making that less appealing to her, more on that later), they’ll go back into the Dura Whelp box in the guest room overnight, and into the big pen during the day. At least for a few nights.

Today’s new enrichment item was a piece of tinfoil that made new sounds and was weird to grab and move around. The BAD thing about all this enrichment is that they think that EVERYTHING is there to be played with (which is what you want, of course, that’s a big part of the whole point of the Puppy Culture thing) – and now the cord for the heating pad seemed interesting to Ruffles all of a sudden, so we’ll have to address that for safety!

And they got to eat some MEAT! They all tasted some ground beef and three of them were pretty good eaters! Orson lay on his back and let me feed him tiny meatballs as if they were grapes. Ruffles happily ate tiny meatballs from my fingers (also important for learning how to take food from hands, which you don’t really think of as a skill they need to learn, but they do!), and Frito had to be convinced by having some put in his mouth, but once he tasted it he ate with enthusiasm. Popcorn and Chex ate some but then the sandman came for them and they needed to snooze. Everyone got a dose of BeneBac again this morning, since I knew I was going to start really insisting that they eat solid food and I wanted everyone’s digestive systems to be happy.

The last two litters took to eating solid food like, well, proper Vallhunds should take to food! I started offering food at three weeks and they ate it. This litter seem to be holdouts. I’ve been offering them various things over the last week, getting them to lick off our fingers, using various different bowls and plates. They just haven’t seemed to want to eat much that wasn’t ZhoraMilk. However, a bit of chatting to other breeders and research on the good old internet gave me a couple of ideas for today, and they seemed to help. First, I added some Karo syrup to their goat’s milk, and the sweeter taste seemed to make it more appealing, they all at least lapped some up. And they all seemed to like raw ground beef (90/10 if you’re interested). So I feel a bit better that they all at least ate SOME solid food, since Zhora isn’t going to be able to keep up with providing them with 100% of their calories for very long! Plus…the teeth. Owwy.

You can see their shapes changing, they’re less roly-poly and starting to look more streamlined. They’re all walking fairly well and they’re using the litterbox as best they can (they will have a turf patch in the big house which will make the potty area larger and easier for them to use, plus it should help a LOT with housetraining).