We started the week with a VERY lazy Saturday (I was out on Friday and very much socially satiated and lazy).

Sunday, we were ready to rumble again! Alan and Kiba were going to join our hike, but Alan’s mom had to go to the emergency room, so that fell through. Charlie, Hilo and Nemo joined us instead:

We were out for a long time and had food after. Unlike she typically would,
Game was happy spending Monday just being lazy.

Monday, the day after the hike, Game slept on the bed most of the day and regularly made content grunty sounds (I haven’t heard her make these sounds before – they are very cute). She also spent a lot of time on her back, legs up in the air, and encouraged Chai to lick her.

The last day of Game’s week, Friday, she got to see another human and dog friend: Alan and Kiba.

Alan, Kiba, Game. Can you see her pregnant belly? She’s also clearly saying, this is enough carrying my heavy belly around on a hot day in the second picture: our cue to head home!

As of this week, there MUST be an extra snack every day. Game asks for it and won’t accept no for an answer. She now eats breakfast, lunch and dinner. I’m using the different food categories I want to expose the embryos to, so the extra snacks are eggs, raw meat (different protein sources), meat bones, canned food of different brands and human-food leftovers. I’m trying to remember to use hotdogs and cheese to train even though she’d work for kibble. I would love for the puppies to inherit Game’s iron stomach!

As of Thursday, Game has requested a reduction in exercise which, of course, she is is receiving!

Two of this week’s raw dinners/extra meals/snacks. My dog obviously doesn’t care what her food looks like, but I’m having fun with it.

I also got an extra formal meal this week, aka 5-course sushi at what was probably the fanciest restaurant I’ve been to (I’m not a fancy restaurant person, but this tasted AMAZING). It was a “thank you for dog training support!” dinner a friend took me on. You all, feel free to “pay” me with food for things I’d happily do just because! This was YUMM!

It’s whelping box time!

On March 6, Game had another bout of denning behavior: she dug in between the two pieces of my couch and under its blanket. I thought we’d have another week or so, but she is letting me know it is time to get the welping box … ahm … my kitchen … ready. I’ll temporarily turn my kitchen into a whelping room. I rarely cook anyways, so it’s not as if I was giving anything up. I’ll put a low barrier in the door so Game can come and go, but the puppies will have to stay. The kitchen has a tile floor, but it’s old and I don’t want puppy urin and other fun juices to get stuck in the cracks between the tiles, so I’ll use a large tarp to cover the floor. I’ll add a layer of puzzle mats for traction and then lots of blankets and pillows for Game to make herself comfortable so she can really dig herself a nest or cave or build a blanket fort in a corner – whatever makes her happy. The far side of the digging corner will have a washable fake-grass puppy toilet and water bowl. Anything else (enrichment items, visitors etc.) will fit in between these two ends of the rectangular room.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering: we’ll only be in the city for the first few weeks of the puppies’ lives. I want them to still be in Mexico City the first week of their sensitive socialization period, but after, we’ll have a house and yard outside the city so the puppies can run. It’s close enough to visit the city and keep socializing, but for the most part, I’ll want them to have lots of space once they are mobile!

Exceptional snacks and scavenging log of the week:

• Extra dinners (frozen meat bones (beef), chicken, pork, rice, banana).
• Desserts with Panacur mixed in: yogurt, eggs, a new kind of canned food (last week was Royal Canin, this week is Pedirgree de res molido).
• Crackers a kid must have dropped in front of a school.
• Some horse poop (apparently, pregnant Games like horse poop.)
• The wing of a dead bird, smashed into the street (we’ll call it a food toy.)
• Hotdogs and cheese for training/shaping sessions.

Preparations

• I bought a thermometer. Supposedly, a dog’s body temperature drops by 1 degree 24 hours before whelping. I’ll monitor her temperature starting one week before her theoretical due date.
• Balloons: I got a bag of balloons that I’ll pop to get the puppies used to startling sounds (in Game’s absence) during the sensitive socialization window.
• I got nailpolish in the colors of the puppy collars I’m planning to use. In addition to putting collars on the puppies, I’ll also paint one of their nails in case the collars slip off when they are still tiny. I’m hoping for 4 puppies, so these should be more than enough colors!
  

Yes, I know you all know what nailpolish looks like. I’m just excited
and want to share the little things! Documenting stuff brings me joy.

• I got most whelping box ingredients: a tarp, pool noodles and tape to seal off the floor, additional puzzle mats, soft, washable carpets, duvets, blankets and pillows, a low see-through barrier (for the door) and an additional water bowl. Still need to get puppy toilets, but that’s not urgent. We’re almost all set!
• I re-watched Jessica Hekman‘s excellent The Biology of Socialization webinar. Speaking of – below are a few notes!

The biology of socialization¹

We know puppies have a sensitive socialization period: behaviorally, this window of time is sensitive because during this time period, the puppy is physiologically not yet able to experience a fear response. That is to say, if you measured the puppy’s cortisol levels during that period, you wouldn’t find any because the puppy’s body cannot yet produce cortisol. OR (I’m not sure which one it is) the cortisol is there, but the puppy’s body is unable to detect it/respond to it. In either case, as a result, we do not see a fear response in the puppy’s behavior while they are in their sensitive socialization period. We can still socialize (introduce them to humans and other dogs) after the window has closed (i.e. the puppy’s body produces cortisol and they have the ability to experience fear, which we see in their behavior), but it will take longer. The younger the puppy is, the less cortisol is being produced and the milder their fear response. 

The most important/effective time to socialize a puppy is before there is any fear response: they are quick to file away any stimulus they encounter as safe and normal in their world. This window varies, but it goes from approximately 4 to 7 weeks of age. If you got a puppy yourself, you would usually only get them at 8 weeks or older. So a lot of the determining factors of who that puppy grows up to be are entirely out of your (the puppy’s future human’s) control.

We know, and I’m sure that’s the case in humans as well, that pretty much everything is a gene-environment interaction. So yes, the puppy’s genetics do matter – for example, we know that separation anxiety and noise sensitivity run in certain breeds and lines of dogs. While we haven’t figured out the complexity of the contributing genes, we know that if a puppy’s parents are both noise sensitive or both have separation anxiety, their offspring will be at a high risk to also develop these issues even if they are being cross-fostered by a mom who does not have these issues – it isn’t a learned response. 

Apart from that, there is the in-utero environment that plays a huge role in who the puppy will be. Jessica explains it this way: there is an on-switch (the amygdala), an off-switch (the hippocampus) and a volume control (how much cortisol will be produced) as far as a dog’s stress response is concerned.

The sensitivity of the nervous system dashboard is determined in utero and in the first weeks of life. This makes evolutionary sense because canids live all over the world, and their environments differ greatly. The majority of dogs, for example, are free roaming dogs and not pet dogs. Depending on where you grow up, it makes sense to have a hair-trigger on-switch for your fear response, OR to have an on-switch that takes quite a lot of effort to activate. (If you’re a pet dog, there is no need for your on switch to be sensitive, but if you are a free-roaming dog in certain parts of the world, there may be. What increases your survival chances is determined by the environment you will be living in later in life, and your (the dog’s) body is fine-tuned to that environment before being born and in the first weeks of life. It makes sense that it would be at this early stage rather than later: young puppies aren’t very mobile and their dam will have sought out a safe spot to have the puppies. So there is no need to be afraid of what they encounter within or in the immediate vicinity of their nest. However, as they get more mobile and start venturing further from the nest, it makes sense to be able to experience fear because there may be dangers just around the corner. Once you (the puppy) venture out into the world, your chances of survival would be low if you were not afraid of, say, a bird of prey or a car. 

The off switch is equally important. It relates to what we trainers call the dog’s “bounce back”: does the dog startle easily, but also recover quickly? Or does the dog startle easily and then need the rest of the day to recover? Jessica calls the latter case a sticky off-switch. The hippocampus “decides” when the volume (the amount of cortisol (and maybe also other stress hormones?)) is high enough to flip the off-switch. 

For a family dog, we want an on-switch that does not easily get flipped. We want a volume control set to low (only small amounts of cortisol being released when the dog feels stressed in case the on-switch does get triggered), and we want a sensitive off-switch (it only takes small amounts of cortisol to “convince” the hippocampus to turn off the stress response again).

I want to make the most out of the sensitive socialization window in terms of introducing my puppies to as many people and dogs as possible to maximize the chances that they will feel safe and confident around people and other dogs in their future. With working line Mals, you usually get the drive and the workiness for free, but you sure don’t get socialbility and stable temperaments around dogs and humans for free. So this is where I’ll focus my efforts: I want to give the puppies the greatest possible chance to be lovely to live with and be able to go places with their humans, independently of what or whether they work and do sports. Both parents are like this, and with a little luck and a little help, we’ll get puppies like this as well.

This week’s color planner/tracker

I re-designed the trackers for the remaining weeks: I removed the check-box for the weekly car ride – turns out we tend to go on more than one anyways these days. And I added a few things based on what I’ve learned over the last weeks.

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1. This is how I understood Jessica Hekman’s fantastic webinar. All mistakes in the paragraph below this heading are mine! ↩︎