Dog and human friends

We started the week meeting Daniel and Dina – dog and human friends, check! Game wasn’t particularly interested in playing with Dina apart from being happy to see and greet her (Chai, for her part, was very much interested in running with her gal), but loved getting lots and lots of scratches from Daniel. These last few days, Game has become extra social even around new dogs: she’ll wag and greet and lick snouts/have hers licked. This is interesting; I would have expected the opposite as her due day gets closer. But Game’s social side is blooming these days!

Saturday morning with Daniel and Dina.

What isn’t blooming is her love of exercise: being heavier than she ever was in combination with unusually (well, we know that climate change means the unusual is normal) warm days mean that Game has now decided she will no longer do her supposedly healthy endurance trots. That’s okay with me; the queen gets what the queen wants! These days, this is snuggles, sleeping in my bed and lots of food. As I’m typing this, it is Sunday, a little after 4PM and Game just requested (and received) her dinner two hours early. She continues enjoying food toys and training sessions – but not too, too much running around, thank you very much.

Exceptional treats and scavenging

Monday, March 11, was the first day Game didn’t want breakfast (but insisted on her other meals). On Tuesday, she ate half her breakfast and, as usual, a full lunch and dinner, and by Wednesday, she was back to normal. Yay! I hope that’s the only discomfort she ends up feeling.

Two of this week’s extra meals: beef shank with marrow bone, a side of rice and a touch of parsley and a fish-and-rice bowl with avocado sprinkles.

Exceptional scavenging finds of the week:

• Chilaquiles
• Yellow and blue tortilla chips
• Crunchy fried tortilla
• Cake frosting
• A big puff pastry

Little training sessions

Among other things, one particular shaping project for our daily little training sessions was a spin. These are, I believe, the first two full spins Game has offered! Pregnant dogs learn new things too. Isn’t she super cute? That belly really shows (particularly because you can still see where it was shaved for the ultrasound) and her movements look … well, let’s say less athletic than usual. Panting – also not something she’d be doing usually, but carrying that baggage around changes things! Love the waggy tail and how she is having a great time in any case, pregnant-bellied or not!

This week’s outdoors adventure came with water fetch!

It’s warm and carrying that big belle is heavy. Game has slowed down, but few things are better than a good swim, rolling in the dirt and a slow trot around the lake!

Jacaranda bliss!

Preparations

+ I re-watched the first parts of the Puppy Culture video. Some notes on it below:

• Supposedly (no sources were mentioned), puppies turn out to be “more docile” (quote from the film; I am not 100% sure how they’d operationalize “docile”) when you stroke the dog’s belly a lot late in the pregnancy. So I’ve been focussing our snuggle sessions more on Game’s belly – if and only if she consents, of course. I assume that as long as she enjoys it, it can’t hurt, whether it actually does something for the puppies or not.
• The colostrum – the milk produced in the first 24 hours after giving birth – is how the puppies get maternal antibodies against anything she is immune/vaccinated to. (I had forgotten about this fact and used to think they already get these antibodies when plugged into her system in utero.) The wild thing is that the puppies’ bodies are only able to absorb these antibodies without breaking them down (and losing their benefits in the process) in the first 18 hours of their life! So getting colostrum in the first 18 hours matters. The maternal antibodies will protect them in their first few weeks of life. This is important to me since I am going to prioritize socialization, i.e. the puppies are going to be exposted to visitors and go places etc. before their first vaccine.
• Activated sleep: fun fact! Tiny puppies twitch in their sleep. That’s because in their first two weeks of life, all puppies do is sleep and eat. The twitching is caused by electrical stimuli and it trains their muscles to get stronger as they sleep. What a big difference between altricial (born before they are fully developed – for example, puppies are born with their eyes and ears sealed shut) and precocial species (like horses who’ll run around and eat independently within hours after being born!)

+ I connected with Jessica Hekman to find answers to some questions that will help me with my socialization plan.¹ I want to focus on human and dog socialization – the rest, you’ll pretty much get for free in a Mal, but I want these puppies to get the best chance at being able to be family members in addition to whatever else they’ll grow up doing. I’ve taken an Avidog breeder course, I’ve got Puppy Culture, took Jessica’s Genetics/Environment FDSA class, read the linked papers, Carol Beuchat’s genetics class, read the linked papers there and watched all of Jessica’s FDSA webinars on biology and personality. I still have questions:

I know puppies can’t hear or see when they are born. They find their way to each other and to their dam by means of detecting heat. But are they able to smell right away? (This will impact my socialization strategy: if they can already smell different dogs and different people, I would not only handle them myself and have Game interact with them before they can see and hear, but also have other humans handle them and introduce other dogs even when they are still blind and deaf. As a dog trainer, I have seen so much behavioral fallout that when it comes to behavioral benefit/health risk assessment of fragile puppies, I come down heavy on the side of the most socialization possible, no matter the health risk. Personally, I’d expose puppies in my care to physical risks anytime if it set them up for behavioral success.² Jessica believes they can smell – which means I’ll want to already introduce humans and dogs other than me in the first and second weeks of life (other dogs will be tiny dogs or be held so they can’t step on the puppies.)

BUT – and this was the second question Jessica helped me answer: I know that Game may be protective of her litter. Probably not against close human friends, but potentially against dogs she doesn’t know extremely well. In order to avoid the puppies being exposed to Game’s potentially negative response, I would remove Game when introducing other dogs or humans who aren’t close friends of Game’s. But of course Game would smell the strangers – human or non-human – on her puppies when I let her back into the room. So my question to Jessica was: will she be stressed by this smell on her puppies? Will this stress translate into her milk, and if so, will milk satiated by stress hormones do more harm than socialization does good?

I don’t know where to look for this information, and it has probably not been studied in dogs. Jessica assumes, based on her knowledge of the scarce research that is out there, that only chronic stress would be passed on to the puppies in Game’s milk.

These were the only two questions I still had that Jessica could answer – sadly, there are hardly any studies on puppy socialization.

That’s why I’m skeptical of Puppy Culture³ protocols, for example: yes, there are expert interviews, which is all good – but where are the sources? Show me the studies! Some things said in the Puppy Culture film are incorrect – for example, they suggest we not comfort a scared puppy in order to avoid reinforcing their fear response. We know it is not possible to reinforce fear though. They also introduce their “adult recall cue” by doing the new cue/old cue technique in the wrong order: instead of saying the new cue (in the film, it’s “Come” before the old cue (in the film, the breeder’s high-pitched puppy recall), they say the old cue first and follow it up with the new cue.

Knowing things like this, expert interviews are not enough for me to trust that what is shared in Puppy Culture is necessarily the best or only approach. I want to see papers or get the information from someone I know won’t say things that haven’t been studied. Jessica is scientifically rigorous, and I am glad that I found “it has not been studied in dogs, but based on what we know about other animals, it is probably biologically/physiologically/neurochemically this way”-type answers to two of my questions with their help. Thank you, Jessica! And thank you for not sugarcoating things we do not know for sure!

+ I got raspberry leaf tea (supposedly helpful in the last days before giving birth) – I’ll add a shot of it to Game’s food starting tomorrow, on the first day of week 5 (day 62/61). This has not been scientifically studied, but since I don’t see it doing harm, why not. Plus I like tea myself.

+ I got an x-pen that I’ll use to take the puppies to parks and other public places, and to protect things I don’t want them to get into at home.

+ I got a re-usable puppy toilet and an extra rectangle of fake grass! Almost everything is ready!

Denning news

On Friday, March 15, Game joyfully dug into the pillow-duvet-blanket fort I’ve built for her. I’ve showed it to her every day and spent some time watching my drama TV shows with her (and without Chai) in there every day since I’ve finished it, and on the last day of this week, she finally seemed convinced that it might be a good place to have puppies. Yay! (She can have them anywhere she wants, but it would be most convenient there. That way, I won’t have to throw out my couch or my mattress after they’ve been soaked in fun bodily juices!)

The week’s color tracking sheet

As of Wednesday, I’ve been tracking Game’s body temperature. Supposedly, it goes down by 1 degree 24 hours before giving birth. I’m curious if that’s actually true!

If I made another tracking sheet, I would update this one further: the second line in the left column would go, since outstanding scavenging is further down on the list already. And I’d put “temperature” in as a pre-printed field. As it is, I will stick with this sheet since I’ve already printed it twice – and I won’t need a third one since a dog’s gestation period is 63 days! Wheee!

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1. Let me add this here: Jessica – and I appreciate this very much – would refuse to give anyone advice about socialization (“not a dog trainer, not a behaviorist, but a scientist.”) The socialization I will be doing will be partly informed by how Jessica has answered my questions about “what do we know – what does science say,” but it will always be my socialization decisions (I am saying this specifically in case some of them turn out to not go so well). Jessica would not say, “Do or don’t do this.”
   I so appreciate people who know what they can and want to have informed opinions on and who will not present personal opinions as facts. So let me just reiterate: Jessica is not the kind of person who would tell me what to do with a 2 week old puppy. That’s all me. Jessica would just say something like, “In rats that get licked by their mothers in X way, it has been measured that at Y weeks, there is more of Z brain chemical present. Here is the study.” Jessical would absolutely not say, “I believe you should do XYZ with your newborn puppies.” She would say, “Watch Puppy Culture or consult a behaviorist. I am not a dog trainer.” And I very, very much appreciate this. The dog world has so many people with SO many opinions based on just-so stories that are presented as facts. Having opinions is absolutely valid. Claiming they are facts is not. My puppy socialization will be based on my personal opinions, which I am forming based on sparsely available facts and my dog trainer bias (I constantly see behavior challenges, but not medical ones). ↩︎
2. This is how I, personally, want to do this. It is not based on a rigorously studied protocol, but on my opinion, and I am NOT saying you should do this with your litter. You do you, not me! It is absolutely valid to prioritize physical health or aim for the balance that is right for YOU! We do not have enough evidence to know what the best approach is (and I doubt there is a single best approach anyways.) So I say, like in many things in life, we all do our own best and let others do theirs. And we don’t get upset about the fact that of course, different people are going to do things differently. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. Enjoy my puppies – and in case the way I do things upsets you, go enjoy something that brings you joy instead! ↩︎
3. While I am skeptical of Puppy Culture and do not consider it “the one and only perfect way of raising puppies” due to certain factual errors in the film and the lack of resources, I very much appreciate the film and will be using many of its ideas. It is without doubt an excellent puppy starter, and as a future puppy owner, knowing the person raising the puppies followed Puppy Culture protocols is undoubtedly a green flag. For a first-time puppy owner, I’d also recommend checking out Puppy Culture materials. Perfect or not, it comes with A LOT of truly excellent information and fun ideas!
   I also know that making factual errors happens – I made one in the puppy book I wrote, too. When I asked for it to be corrected or a “please note that …” leaflet to be added to the book, unfortunately, my publisher told me they could only do this for the next print run because it would be too expensive otherwise (disappointing!) Anyways, my point is: while healthy scientific rigor is great, we can also learn from things that aren’t perfect. ↩︎