Puppies – The Fifth Week
The puppies have this small outside area with a sheet over the top of their pen, to prevent predation by birds of prey. (Chip visiting puppies on the outside.)
01/1/13
Category Archives: The Development of Puppies
Socialisation, habituation, neutralisation, raising, developing, growing. Blogs about future-dogs.
12/26/12
Puppies – The Fourth Week
Boomer sleeping.
The puppies continue to grow and be healthy and happy. At 3.5 weeks they began to be offered solid food (mince beef) to start the process of weaning. They now only get access to Clover after they’ve been offered ‘real food’. (The idea is that they will fill up on mince before having a drink.) Clover is no longer getting several big meals a day, as we want to encourage her to cut back on the milk production. Continue reading
12/23/12
Television is Good for Puppies
Not only do puppies respond to television, but watching the tube may have a positive role in their development.
3.5 week old border terrier puppy watching TV.
Researchers conducted controlled studies which exposed puppies to video images between 3 and 5 weeks of age. This was based on the principle we commonly call ‘socialisation‘ – that exposure to stimuli in puppyhood (particularly from about 3 weeks until 12-14 weeks) creates adult dogs that are less fearful and less anxious, and so impacts upon the temperament and coping style of the dog. The authors said, “puppies that are not exposed to particular kinds of environmental stimuli during this period have an increased likelihood of developing a fearful response to those stimuli, which may present clinically either as inappropriate avoidance behaviour, fearful withdrawal, or fear-related aggression”.
Because puppies at 3-5 weeks show no sign of fear when approaching objects, but start to have fearful responses at 5 weeks, and most puppies will display fear often as 7 week olds, it was theorised that exposing puppies to stimuli at 3-5 weeks may help shape future behaviour in a positive way.
Particularly, these researchers considered that puppies raised in sterile kennel environments (i.e. Dunbar’s ‘lemon puppies’) could be bettered though audiovisual stimulation. In other words, television as a remedy to the sub-standard socialisation in kennels.
In this experiment, puppies were raised in a ‘commercial’ establishment in a barren pen, with two meals a day, housed with mum.
The experiment used 7.16 minutes of video were 50% ‘animate’ (people, dogs, etc) and 50% ‘inanimate’ (such as traffic, vacuum cleaner, etc). The television was played as ‘normal’ – not loud and not with modification to the colour composition of the screen.
12/12/12
Puppies – The Third Week
Clover with six puppies in the whelping box, with the 'door down' so that they have a bit of a pen.
The puppies turned 3 weeks old, and they started to get busy! They started walking, and toys were interested to their pen. Their pen was made bigger. Grass was also added to the end of the pen, so they can start toilet training (in theory).
The puppies only met one new person this week. That doesn’t mean that they didn’t meet a lot of people – they did! Just they were all (but one) repeats of the week before.
From the 25th of November (puppies at 19 days old) the puppies started to approach people in a happy way.
A waterbowl was introduced to the pen for puppies, but no pups were really interested at this age.
The set-up in this picture was soon changed, as the puppies weren’t quite strong enough to get up the ramp into the whelping box. The whelping box came out, and so the puppies were left with just a pen.
11/25/12
Puppies 2012 – The First Week
Puppies are born with their eyes and ears closed, and are almost ‘blobs’ and personality-less. However, they can feel hot and cold, and they can smell, and that’s enough for us to begin to habituate puppies to touch and begin socialisation.
Clover and 3-day-old puppies.
Early Neurological Sitmulation
We always commence early neurological stimulation on our puppies. This is a program that runs from day 3 until day 16. However, the program very much advises that puppies are not overly stressed by this program being modified in any way – i.e. extending the times or the frequency of any of the stimulation. Because of this, I do not perform these stimulation exercises on days where we are expecting ‘puppy visitors’. These puppy visitors often handle the puppies in a way that tick many of the exercises, anyway. Because of our attempts at bottle feeding, puppies also did not undergo neurological stimulation on these days, as this process was deemed to be stressful enough for the pups. (Watch a video about early neurological stimulation.)
Some include an extra component of early neurological stimulation which includes introducing puppies to new smells. I don’t actively attempt to do this with my puppies, but they do receive exposure to new smells as mum is fed different foods in the whelping box, from different people handling the puppies, and also different products on these peoples (e.g. fabric conditioners, hand moisturisers, etc).
Meeting New People Continue reading
