Sasha’s 9 Puppies are 4 weeks old today and all are progressing well

Sasha is still being a wonderful mum to her 9 pups as you can see from the above picture. This is one of my favourite pictures which shows how relaxed and content her pups are. Some are feeding while others who have had their feed are playing and biting her nails.

This was of real interest to me because Sasha has had real problems biting her nails during her pregnancy and since. Our vet says it is probably an allergy but whatever it is her pups seemed to think they could help out.

She is still feeding her pups but her milk is reducing and I have started to wean her pups onto an all in one feed. She wants to go out in my van at every opportunity clearly hoping that I will take her out to do what she loves more than anything else and that is to play our searching and tracking games.

At 9 oclock every night on the dot she sits by the cupboard in the kitchen waiting for her Weetabix and goats milk.

The pups are really getting very active now and as good a mum as she is I can see she is starting to find it tough. Here are some pictures of the gang about to come over the top of the front board.

The below picture is one of my favourites because all of the pups heard Sasha come into the room and they all piled over the front board not realising she had come into the back box behind them.

I am continuing split feeds to make life easier for Sasha. She likes to feed them on the cold tile floor rather than in the whelping box and she is much happier feeding them in small groups.

A remarkable thing happened yesterday.  I was cleaning out the whelping box and the exercise run.

The pups were in with me when Sasha came in and they all piled onto her desperate to feed They were obviously starving and were very noisy but Sasha was clearly not keen to feed them in this area.

She came over and barged me clearly telling me something. I took 4 of the pups over to the tiled floor and she immediately fed them.

She then happily fed the remaining 5 pups in the same place.


How frustrating it must be for dogs not being able to tell us what they want. All the time they try to communicate and all too often we either don’t understand or worse we don’t realise that they are trying to communicate. There is so much we have to learn. 

We have already had lots of visitors and the pups absolutely love meeting people. Here is one of the pups having fallen asleep on one of our visitors.

II also recorded a short video of the encounter which is really funny to watch.


A regular visitor is dad Lenny who is now completely used to the pups and Sasha is very comfortable with him being there.

This week I started getting the pups ready to eat normal food . I do this by taking each pup one at a time using a small ball of raw minced beef I get them to eat it out of my hand.

 It is the most natural thing for a pup to eat and they always eat it without drawing breath.

I do this a couple of times and then I introduce a very small amount of Salmon and potato all in one puppy food soaked and mixed in the blender and then I cover the food in raw minced beef. I then feed this by hand in a small dish which they always love.


Once I have done this I am ready to introduce their food in their own individual dish. I feed the pups in two’s on a raised platform to get them used to human hands around their bowl while they feed and to make sure each pup gets its fair share.

It is obviously a bit more time consuming feeding this way and I have had some breeders tell me I should feed them in groups to encourage competiveness. I can tell you that I have never had problems with any of my pups lacking in competiveness or determination later on.

What I think it does do is prevent food aggression later on because they are relaxed and see human hands around their bowl as a good thing from a very early age. They certainly enjoyed their first meal and promptly went soundly to sleep

 

They have also had their first drink of water.

One of the pups black collar ( previously no collar ) had been causing me concern due to not putting on weight and Sasha obviously was aware of a problem because she was giving her special attention.

One on one sessions seem to have done the trick.

I have introduced some small toys and already they are tugging and carrying them around. Pink dot collar is always the one who comes out from the crowd with the toy and keeps hold of it.

I have included several other photo’s which I thought were quite nice

I have also included a short video of all the pups just to show you how active and energetic they now are.


Tomorrow I will be extending the exercise run and we are just about ready to take the pups out into the garden which is when things start to get really interesting.

Hope you enjoyed the blog and see you all next week.

Bye for now from Lenny, Sasha and me.