02.06.10
Posted in News at 02:31 by nikki
Well, they are all doubled now and some don’t have far to triple. I’ve added some more photos in the Week 2 album.
Took Skella in to the vets (not a student vet this time) today and apart from the fact that she had a slight fever they couldn’t see anything although from all the info we gave them about how she is acting and the bleeding (of course she didn’t bleed while she was there) they think that quite possibly there was some damage to the uterus and most likely from the shots she got. So they told us to keep a close eye on her and sent Rúnar home (I was at home with the puppies) with some antibiotics but said NOT to give them unless we felt she needed them. They are good and careful that way, don’t give those drugs like candy because it’s so easy to make the body resistant to the antibiotics as so often happens with humans. They feel that we might have to spay her but insisted it not be done if not totally necessary until after the pups are gone. They would rather she be able to care for her pups without extra stress or problems from surgery. Which I’m so totally in agreement.
For the great news. They are starting to open their eyes, Tásla has one eye open now at the 2 a.m. feeding and they are all so big Aron is already 820 grams and he is drinking around 50 ml all by himself! Amazing how quickly they grow without you really actually noticing even though we weigh them many times a day it still comes as a great surprise when they are actually that big already.
The other dogs got to see the puppies while Skella was at the vet’s today and Birta seemed to realize that she was a grandma. If was a bit funny, she sniffed one of the puppies and then went and sniffed Klói’s butt. I wonder if there is a similar family smell to dogs?! I imagine so.
Well, I better get to bed for a few hours before they wake up again wanting more. A couple cute photos taken tonight of the other love bugs in the house. Rúnar has been taking the feedings in the evenings and half the weekends. These guys are feeling a bit left out most of the time so they grab any moment they can with Daddy! Frigg and Hófi got to go to the store with us yesterday and got to run on the way home but it was SO cold.
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02.04.10
Posted in News at 01:21 by nikki
Yay, tonight little Tumi has doubled his birthweight. I can see from the numbers that the others will most likely be doubled by tomorrow night and perhaps the first born bitch Tásla the next day because she is gaining slower than the rest. She likes to play with the bottle and is not as pushy as the others. The two black ones are growing so much faster but they were also the heaviest born so I think it is all going very evenly. They are getting so big that in a couple days it will be hard to hold them while giving them the bottle.
Rúnar has been so helpful this week and has been busy all evening after he gets home so that I can both rest and do other things like mop the floors, do the dishes, make supper etc. They still seem to want their food every couple hours so even though we have tried to spread out the time a bit we’ve gotten up to about 3 hours at the most and then we hear them with their little Mogwai calls and you can hear sucking noises and that means we have to get in their quickly to stop the poor males getting their privates injured. Hehe
Skella has had some extra bleeding the past few days and we are concerned about her. She did have a double dose of oxytosin and I know that can have side effects although the student vet said it was safe. I know of a bitch in Norway who bled to death after a litter because of too much of the drug so, true to myself as always, I’m worrying. I know it’s probably nothing but we called the vet tonight to ask (the same vet that came to our house) and he said that possibly she has a ruptured blood vessel or a vein leaking and that if we want we can bring her in tomorrow for a check-up if we don’t see any difference in the colour or amount of the blood. It’s not really bleeding excessively but enough that we know that our other females have not bled like that after a litter and the blood is so clean coloured not like the typical left over stuff that they rid their bodies of.
She is being a great mom though, cares for them so well and cleans them so we don’t have to worry about any of that. They are drinking a bit from her now because she seems to have gotten some milk just not all that much and of course that can partly be because we are feeding them and she doesn’t have to produce more but we have also found a knot in one of the back teats that we have been trying to massage and see if it will go away.
We got these adorable photos of Tryggur Aron drinking and I just have to share. He started out with a vengeance like he always does, drinks himself silly then he gets all OOOOh I drank too much and lastly he refuses the bottle. He is the cutest and they all remind me so much of Klói’s character. Speaking of Klói he has been able to come see his puppies a couple times and is quite fascinated by them still.
I am so happy with these little puppies, they are so sweet and we have already started some “training”, both scent training and environmental enrichment like different textures. I have not done the Early Neurological Stimulation on them and will not do it with bottle fed pups. They get way too much handling as it is and I also think that because the program was originally developed for kennel dogs that it may be putting some of our pups over the threshold and causing more stress and reactivity than they need to have. I remember thinking this last time and decided that I would not do the exercises with Raggi and Rún. I will admit that through the years the more I learn about dogs, clicker training (operant conditioning), stress and calming signals I have been a bit more cautious as to how I want to raise my puppies and I am thinking that environmental enrichment to build up confidence from the start is probably “safer” in terms of not overdoing the physical stressing. Since it does seem to matter how well each individual dog will cope with the stress. I’ve had dogs in the same litter be totally different even though they all got the same exercises as puppies but I do know that the homes they go into make so much of a difference and no stress exercises will change that! Enrichment to the environment and environmental training will.
I’d done the ENS for years on all my litters (can’t remember when I started it…2001 I believe) and I even advocated it to others and was asked to write an article in the kennel club magazine here because I believed it was an important factor of raising strong puppies at the time. However I have to admit that the easiest most confident, calm and collected puppies I’ve ever had are Raggi and Rún. Whether it is because there were only two of them (I will admit I didn’t spend much more time with them than I have any other puppy because at the time I didn’t have too much spare time to even take them for environmental training). While they were here with us they were so easy to get along with, never any stressing or over the top behaviour, and they seem to be very well balanced individuals from what I’ve heard and excel at obedience work. I also often wonder if the stress exercises caused the cancer to develop in a few of my GSP’s (all had different types of cancer but at least one was a stress induced fast growing cancer!). And so I’m just experimenting with how these puppies will turn out, now of course it won’t be a fair experiment because they are bottlefed and get lots of handling anyway.
I have no worries that they will be great family pets because most breeders I know do not do the ENS exercises but their puppies are very easy to settle in normal situations as well as stressful ones. Like I say I think I’m going to look at this whole puppy raising thing in a different way and we are developing a puppy enrichment class for our school that I’m really looking forward to starting. All the puppies that stay here in Iceland out of this litter will get a free course in clicker training as well as what we are going to call “preparation for the world” puppy class.
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