Thank you everyone! I’m reassured! I love her just the way she is, and am actually quite pleased she’s not going to be enormous!!
Yesterday we met up with one of Merlin's littermates. You wouldn't believe that two brothers could be so different! Apart from their coloring, you would never think they were brothers. Merlin weighs around 33 kilos - Murphy weighs 19!!! Merlin is inches taller than him, and much more muscly, while Murphy is faster and more agile. Their characters are different too - Merlin is calm, and a very keen retriever. Murphy is more hectic, has zero interest in retrieving, and runs around the whole time, sniffing. He is being trained as a search and rescue dog. Just to show the huge differences, even within a litter!
That’s a huge difference for sure! They both are adorable. Axel is the only male out of all the littermates I have met that doesn’t have the short snout. He has a very long pointy snout. His actual skull is the same width as all the brothers but it seems smaller just because his pointy face.
Is it weird for me to say that Merlin and his bro have very Teutonic features? No doubting that they're related, they have identical faces!
Hi, my lab is 10 months and just 16-17lbs (she likes to move on the scales). Compared to our other lab who is 40kg full grown (healthy and lean), I obviously worry a little that she has health problems or that I’m under feeding her? Vet says she’s fine though, you can’t see her ribs and she’s always full of energy. I think she’s just a tiny lab (which would probably be a blessing with the older boy being such a big beast ). Do you remember how much your lab weighed around the one year mark?
Many people, mainly men it seems, want their labs to be big, but, as others have said, the main thing is to have a healthy dog. Polly is quite tall for a bitch, but Fern, who had a small mother, is not big herself; neither is her daughter young Ivy, who is 24kg. at 16 months.