Lilly decided to have her babies 5 days early, and as you can appreciate that meant I wasn’t totally ready. She had 6 healthy babies, somewhat less than the 9 we expected. The birth was relatively straight forward, she handled it all marvellously, with me acting in a support role.
What has been really interesting is the characters of the little ones are already so prominent. I am finding them fascinating to watch. They are deaf and blind at the moment, and remind me of little furry sausages. They are crawling around and are really very active, which has been a surprise to me.
Lilly has been an amazing mother so far, she is feeding them regularly and is attentive but not smothering. She has had no problem with me holding her babies, and in fact woke me up last night, to help her as one of her babies had crawled out of the Whelping box and couldn’t get back in again.
I am feeding Lilly about 5 times a day, she has breakfast of raw prime mince beef, then at about 11, she has a rich custard which is packed with egg yolks. For lunch she has puppy meat sachets with Oscars large breed puppy kibble, then at about 5, she has another portion of prime mince. just before bed she has either another portion of custard or a bowl of goats milk.
She is keen to eat and the puppies are putting on about 50g a day each.
I have been following the puppy culture way of raising the babies. As part of this they provide a checklist of tasks to do throughout the puppies lives with me until they go to their new homes. Over the last few days I have clipped their front claws and am also doing a system called ENS virtually every day.
ENS is a protocol that has been shown through research, that if you do this between 3 days and 16 days of life you can cause improvements in stress tolerance, disease resistance, faster adrenal system, stronger heart rate and beat. It includes 5 exercises.
Leave a Reply