Puppy Care

Congratulations on the new addition to your household!

The recommendations made below are a summary of the various requirements for your pup that will help to ensure the pup enjoys a long, healthy and happy life. At the same time, following these guidelines will hopefully minimise any surprises or traumas you might suffer during his upbringing such as chewed shoes, torn cur-tains and sleepless nights!

Owning a puppy is fun, but soon the pup will mature into a dog, who, with proper care, you may expect to live anywhere from 10 years of age, for giant breeds of dog, to 16 years or older, for small breeds.

The combination of a well trained, properly housed and fed, healthy dog will produce a companion that will be a source of joy, friendship, loyalty and constant delight to you for years to come!

Water: Provide your pup with a source of clean water that is changed daily. Use a water bowl that is not easily chewed! Water should always be available at any time.

Housing:Young pups cannot maintain body temperature as well as adult dogs. Housing should be clean, dry, warm, and draft free yet allow for adequate ventilation. Bedding should be changed daily or immediately if dirty. A pup should be housed in a place that allows for frequent interaction with the human mem-bers of the household.

Nutrition:Pups need a balanced diet provided at regular inter-vals throughout the day. Pups will usually start trying alternative foods from 3 weeks of age and are weaned from their mothers at 5-6 weeks of age. To maintain growth, puppies need a diet that provides 2 to 3x the energy an adult dog requires and contain at least 25% (on a dry matter basis) of high quality digestible protein.

Milk replacers: Orphaned pups (less than 3 weeks old) should be fed 6-8x daily with a balanced milk formula such as “Biolac”, "Divetelac". In an emergency, an alternative is a home made blended formula consisting of:

1/2 cup Carnation or Bayer full cream canned condensed milk

1/2 cup water

6-8 drops of a multivitamin e.g. Pentavite

1 level teaspoon glucose

1 egg yolk

Feed the pup for no longer than 5 minutes or until its abdomen visibly starts to enlarge. Do not over feed. Young pups unable to lap will need their milk replacer administered via a neonatal teat and bottle available from us.

A pups first solid food:

Young pups, 3-6 weeks old, should receive additional sources of food other than their mother's milk. Often cow's milk is used or milk and weetbix. However milk is not an es-sential requirement at this stage. A preferable alternative is to provide a high quality fully balanced professional diet food such as Hill's P/D diet or Advanced Pedigree Puppy rehydratable diet. Refer to the side of the can for total daily amount to be fed. As a rough guide, let pup eat as much as it likes in 10 mins, but do not allow the pup to gorge him-self. 3-4 feeds per day is suitable.

Weaned puppy diets: Home made and manufactured diets

Weaned pups (6 weeks to 16 weeks) are now solely depend-ant on you to provide a fully balanced complete diet. Pups should be fed 3-4 times daily. You may choose between feeding a balanced home-made diet (ask our staff for a home diet recipe) or you can choose to feed a commer-cial puppy food diet or better still, a professional food diet (for example: Advance puppy rehydratable dry food) that is a fully balanced high quality diet, or a combina-tion.

Which manufactured diet is best?

A short note on the many types of manufactured diet available: There are 2 main types: (a) Commercial foods These are least cost diets, based on cereal grains with meat by product additives e.g, Pal or (b) Professional diets which are made from meat and high quality ingredients Examples include Advance diets, Hills Science diets and Eukanuba food. Professional diets cost more, but we highly recommend these foods for your pup, especially during the rapid growth of the first 12 months of life.

Dry food and or canned food? It depends on the size of the dog!

Note that canned foods, although balanced, are high in pro-tein on a dry matter basis, but contain about 80% water, so their energy content is low (e.g. Pal contains 85 kcals/100 gms of food). This means that big breed dogs in particular, would have to eat a very large amount of canned food to get their daily energy requirement. Dry foods on the other hand have a high energy concentration (Pal Meaty Bites contain 380 kcals/100 gms of food), although their protein and fat content on a dry matter basis are only about half that of canned foods. Most of the energy from commercial dry foods comes from their high cereal content whereas Professional dry food diets are better formulated as their energy is derived from meats, fats, cereals and other carbohydrates.

In summary, we recommend you feed a mixture of both dry and canned professional diets; more dry to the big breed dog and more canned to the small breed dog.

Supplementing the diet with home prepared fresh foods:

If you decide to feed a manufactured diet, which is highly recommended, you may safely feed additional alterna-tive foods such as meat, cereals e.g. rice, or vegetables so long as they do not exceed 20% of the diet.

Avoid the all meat diet, it is harmful to bone growth

Avoid "all meat" diets or human table food diets as these are not balanced for pups. Supplementation with milk, calcium and or vitamins will not necessarily make these diets balanced. Over supplementation can also produce disease. Severe bone disease can result from "all meat" diets es-pecially in young growing large breed dogs. If you wish to feed meat,

add calcium carbonate powder at 1/2 teaspoon per 100gms meat

How to change your pups diet: Gradually!

Make diet changes gradually over at least 4 days to avoid diet induced diarrhoea. Diarrhoea in a pup lasting more than 24hrs requires Veterinary attention. A rice and meat diet is a low residue low allergenic diet often suitable for feeding during convalescence from diarrhoea.

Feeding adolescent pups (4-6 months)

Adolescent pups (4 to 6 months) are fed similar to the above however their energy needs are starting to decrease, so although the pup eats more because it is gaining weight, the amount of energy/kg body weight required is decreasing. Feed-ing is required about 2x daily. Please refer to the calorie chart at the back to calculate your dog's energy needs for his particular age.

Over-fed dogs more commonly develop certain bone diseases such as "Hip Dysplasia", “elbow dysplasia” and "O.C.D." Mild decreases in en-ergy intake because of dietary restriction or disease, although decreas-ing the pup's rate of growth, has very little effect on the final size your pup will grow to - it just might take a few weeks longer.

Pups reach full size at about 12-18 months, although they reach sexual maturity much earlier, from 6 months of age.

Summary

Adult dogs should be fed a commercial food diet (dry, semi-dry and or canned food), we recommend using a professional diet such as Advance Pedigree dry and canned food, Science diet for pups, Eukanuba Growth. Pups may be fed additional foods (such as meat, eggs, milk, table scraps, bread, rice, vegetables etc) so long as these supplements do not exceed 20% of the total diet. Alternatively a completely balanced home diet can be prepared by you. A recipe is provided here