Breeding and early life
Puppies
A dog's life starts far before they come into your home as a young puppy. These crucial short weeks have a lasting effect on your dog's development, behaviour, socialisation, security and interactions.
Choosing the right ethical breeder is key in order to ensure the puppy you choose, gets the right start.
Choosing the right breed
Working out your motivations for getting a puppy is key in your decision making of which breed you might choose.
This includes thinking about the size of dog that may suit your home size, location, and outdoor space.
Looking at breed groups can help you in what characteristics may suit you and your lifestyle best. At this point you can begin looking at each individual breed for more details about their activity levels, coat maintenance, and potential breed specific behaviours including separation anxiety, stalking, and excessive barking.
Genetics
A healthy puppy is a happy puppy, and having healthy parents is key in giving them the best opportunity for future health. Depending on the breed you are interested in, there are a range of recommended health tests. The kennel-club website amongst others suggests if the overall health of the breed is on a watchlist. If choosing a mixed-breed, it is essential that both origin breeds are researched for health issues to ensure that the puppies are free of any issues from both breeds.
Early environment
The start that your puppy receives before they join your family is impossible to overstate. Quality ethical breeders do not only ensure they are breeding dogs with the best chance of longevity of health and behaviour, but also ensure they give the puppies they breed the best start possible. From the basics of regular worming and constant monitoring, Early Neurological Stimulation, Socialisation, and Sound Exposure are other important aspects of early development. This is not an exhaustive list but a few of the many things that breeders can do to give their puppies a head start in life.
Birth to four weeks
In this phase of your puppies life, with their eyes and ears closed for the first few weeks, they are learning their world through touch, vibrations, temperature variation, and smells. Their mum will provide them with lots of information and help them to suckle, however, this should not be a hands off period as people may believe. Early handling and manouvering of puppies can help them to adjust to being held and understand human contact and cuddles, not be scared of the different smells away from their mum, and build adaptation skills for an ever changing world around them. Temperature changes in their environment such as moving away from their mothers warmth, into relatively colder human hands and back, and allowing them to move from warm to cold surfaces has been suggested to help puppies become more resilient to stress in later life. It also adjusts them to enjoying human contact from before they can see the humans in their life.
Four to eight weeks
Once puppies are moving around independently they should be actively exploring an exciting but safe environment. Included must be a variety of surfaces to allow them to experience different textures under paw. Providing a variety of toys is great for exposing them to multiple textures and learning to play socially with their littermates. Toys hung from above the whelping box and play pen from as soon as the pups have their eyes open, encourages the puppies to engage with the world above them, helping build towards looking to humans for information and instruction.
Enriching the environment with a variety of sounds is crucial, playing thunder sounds, hoovers, door bells, classical music, toilet flushes, and other startling noises can help the puppies to find this auditory information non-threatening, and aid in the prevention of later life noise reactivity.
When safe to do so, puppies can also be exposed to the outside world such as being held outside and allowed to feel fresh air, smell different scents, and see new things. It is very important that puppies are not exposed to unsafe, or uncontrolled environments, especially those where an exposure to dangerous viruses that they are not yet protected against is possible.
Overall
The start your puppy gets is the start of a bigger journey. The work that their breeder starts, must be continued to be successful long term. But to continue something, it must be underway, so choosing a breeder who is actively involved in the puppies development and handling before they join your family is paramount.
If you need any help in your search for a puppy, please do speak with us on your next visit and we can assist with helping you find the right breeder for your future family member.