First Time Puppies: Days 1-3 Experience

Tired. That is what we felt. Tired. Very tired. The first three days were a lot more work than we expected. It wasn’t that the overall experiences was extremely difficult, there was just a lot to do, all the time—even in the middle of the night. Here are some of our experiences and thoughts about those first three days:

• We had read that it was necessary to stay up with the puppies all night, but no one really explained why. There are several really good reasons that you need to get a buddy and take shifts watching the puppies 24/7 the first three days.

  • The puppies really didn’t know where they were, couldn’t move well, and are extremely helpless. For a first time dam (mom), our dog wasn’t very aware and was unsure of the whole mothering process.

  • Our dam often didn’t know how to lay in such a way that all the puppies could access her teats. We had to teach over the first couple of days how to lay down and “roll” so both rows of teats were exposed.

  • The puppies would come to root at food, but several needed help learning to latch and stay on a teat.

  • Because the puppies can’t defecate or urinate on their own, the mother should stimulate them. Our dam needed to learn how to do that. We helped by holding their rear-ends towards her face when each puppy was done nursing and encouraged her to lick. It took her a little longer than these first few days to get great at it, but by the end of the first week she did that on her own well.

  • The puppies definitely tried to get behind their mom when looking for food, so a well designed whelping box is crucial and helping watch them when they are most vulnerable is necessary.

• We chose to supplement early on for anyone who seemed to need extra food. The best way to watch for this was to weigh the puppies every day, at the same time. When we saw slower weight gain (none of our puppies ever dropped weight), though that can be normal, we chose to supplement to keep the puppy on pace as long as they wanted to eat. We feel like this was very helpful, and only did it for the first week until the puppies seemed well established.

• Our dam lived in the whelping box 24/7 (which added to the reasons to watch the puppies all the time). We fed her in there (with extra food and Mother’s Pudding). The only time she left was to potty, and we even had to encourage that at times. We did choose to bring water in and out when we weren’t immediately watching her so there was no chance for the puppies to accidentally get in it.

Our dam was funny, and tried to “nest” in several other parts of the house. All of her places were a little more private than where her whelping box was currently located (under a bed, in our office, etc) so we figured she may have wanted some more privacy. We used a blanket to drape over the top of the whelping box making it truly more “den” like, and that seemed to make her more comfortable.

We had a heat lamp on the edge of the whelping box aimed at one side. At first, we didn’t see any puppies huddled near it, and wondered if it was useful. We removed it for part of a day, and noticed the puppies did seem colder. While they didn’t need the direct heat, the ambient warmth did seem to help them.

We changed the blankets and cleaned the whelping box once in the morning (when we were weighting the puppies and doing their ENS training), and again in the evening when everyone had a cuddle session with each puppy. We did hold them throughout the day and touched them in their whelping box to begin socializing them.

These first few days were exhausting. Having helpers (kids, spouse, etc) felt almost necessary to make sure we kept an eye on the puppies as best we could. Hang in there—you can do it!