Consider a Cash Crop
(Page 5 of 7)
May/June 1972
By Dorothy Lockard
Mother dogs need lots of soft food and plenty of water while nursing . . . the food must be soft because the quantity she'll consume would make her mouth sore if it were hard. If you must feed dry rations, soak them in water and add milk and—perhaps—some hamburger. Vitamin and mineral supplements might be a good idea at this time too, although I've raised good pups without them. If your vet likes you (as mine does), he may give you the sample vitamins he receives from drug companies. Once, a druggist even gave me loads of outdated codliver oil.
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The first few weeks of new puppies' lives is the only difficult part of the dog business. This is where the hard, messy work comes in. We keep our pups in the basement and I get plenty of exercise running up and down stairs to change papers, wash bedding, put down food and let the dogs out to piddle. The grind goes on at night, too: if I hear a pup squeaking, I bounce out of bed and check up on him . . . even a day-old baby can crawl away from the warmth of his mother, get cold and die.
If you only have one mother to care for, the whole operation will probably seem like a lot of fun. Two dogs whelping at once will begin to seem like trouble. With three or more fitters on your hands, you'll spend a lot of time running around muttering to yourself. Breeding dogs is hard work when the pups are young . . . but I've found it to be very rewarding work, too.
If you specialize in a breed that requires clipped tails, you can do the job yourself and save the veterinarian fees. Cutting tails is not as difficult, nor as painful to the dog, as you might think. It's really more of a pinching than a cutting and most puppies won't even yelp once. On the third or fourth day, just clip the tails with a pair of dull scissors. Ask your vet for details.
While the operation won't bother the pups, it's sure to upset mom a bit. Since she'll likely still be a little messy from birthing anyway, tail-clipping time for the young'uns should be bath time for mother. Give her a good sponging off in another part of the house and, if she misses her children, splash her a little and give her lots of attention. Then towel the new mama good and she should relax and enjoy herself until it's time for her to rejoin the litter.
By the way, cropping ears is NOT a safe and relatively painless process like clipping tails . . . and I don't recommend the practice. While most show dogs in the U.S. are cropped, the practice is illegal in many states such as Pennsylvania (where it's not even taught in veterinarian schools). England has banned the practice altogether and dogs are shown there uncropped. Since you'll probably be selling pups about six weeks old (too young to have their ears done), the decision will be up to the purchaser. If you have strong feelings on the matter, then, pick your buyers with care.
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