hi, I’m a new lab owner. Her name is Butters and she is only 7 weeks. Currently she is doing great with her peepee pads and letting me know when she has to use the bathroom. But I have a few concerns. 1. How many times a day should she be eating? She seems to always be hungry but I don’t want to overfeed her. 2. When is a good age to start training, I know she is super young now and I don’t want to start now if it won’t make a difference in 2 weeks. 3. I’m taking her to the vet tomorrow but I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations on puppy food brands and how to evolve from puppy food to dog food. 4. Since she is teething I tried getting her teething sticks, teething bones and none really seem to hold her attention, any recommendations on that? That’s it for now. Any advice is very much appreciated.
Hello and welcome to the forum! It's great to have you here as you embark on your pet parent journey Until some more members arrive to share their experiences and recommendations with you, here are a couple of links to our main site which might be interesting The Puppy Area has lots of information about puppy care, including articles and advice specifically about feeding and teething. And this article reviews our favourite dog chews - if you scroll right to the bottom there's a section specifically about puppy chews. Please come back and let us know how you and Butters get on!
hi @ButtersMomma I would start training now. Name recognition. Reward her for checking in. When she looks at you reward her. I don't know where you live, and therefore don't know how cold it is outside, but I would be teaching her to go outside to the same spot in the garden to urinate and defecate. Recommend that you crate train. Not all members here agree, but I believe it's a highly valuable skill to teach. There is a thread on crate training on this site.
Hi @ButtersMomma Please read the link re socialisation. It is is an extremely important part of training before your puppy is 16 weeks of age. You need to do it. And do so without sensitising the dog to new things. The article's message is that you have to ensure the puppy enjoys herself, and is not forced into confronting new things. https://www.clickertraining.com/dont-socialize-the-dog While you are waiting for her to be vaccinated you can carry your puppy around in a shoulder bag so that she is happily introduced to all things she is likely to experience in the world when she is a mature dog.
This site is a uk one? So governed by UK law? It's illegal to sell pups under 8 weeks here in the UK.
Hi there, and welcome, hope you had a good vet visit and found the links that Sarah gave you helpful. The main puppy feeding guide can be found here: https://www.thelabradorsite.com/feeding-your-labrador-puppy/ Let us know how you get on
The site is currently hosted in the UK, though that may change. However we have a truly international audience, and the majority of our visitors are not British Currently 55% of our visitors are from the USA, 27% UK, 5% Canada, 4% Australia, with about twenty other countries around the world making up the remainder.
Entering location in profiles is optional and even if everyone filled that in, I don't think Xenforo has an option to sort members by location. But we do have a thread where people entered where they are from - I'll have a look for it.
At 7 weeks, I'd have her on 3 meals a day plus a snack before bed (a much smaller meal). Labs are highly food motivated (most of them!) and you are right, you can't feed to appetite or you'd end up with an overweight dog. It is best to take advice from your breeder on how much she was eating at the breeder's and how frequently and then adjust from there according to her weight and body condition. Please don't feed what it says on the packet - it will almost always be too much!! Instead, look at her shape physically and think about whether she is too slim or too fat. You should always be able to EASILY feel her ribs and to count them when you run your fingers down her side. You can start as soon as you get your puppy home. Heck, when we breed a litter we start training off at 4 weeks old, as soon as the pups are weaned. Use her meals (if you feed kibble) to train with 3-4 times a day and that will give you loads of opportunities. In terms of when to move from puppy food to dog food, that can differ from one manufacturer to another and it's best to follow the recommendations for whatever brand you are feeding in terms of when to switch. I would recommend not taking advice from the vet on dog foods because the majority of vets earn commission from selling specific brands of food so they are hardly impartial(!). A lot of their training and 'stuff' (from files to pens to lectures) at vet school are also sponsored or funded by dog food manufacturers. I would recommend finding a food with as high a meat content as possible. A good quality food will have around 80% meat. The two things which seem a hit with my puppies are: Deer antler chews (don't feed these once adult teeth come in, as they are very hard and can damage adult teeth - puppies have weak jaws and can't bite hard enough to hurt themselves!). Yakkers chews. (Ditto.). PetStages DogWood chews (wooden chews - good if your puppy likes to chew furniture...). Also, you didn't ask a question about this one - but I really wouldn't recommend the use of pee pads. They will actually make toilet training take much longer and give conflicting messages to your puppy about where the right place to go is. Outside should always be the place, and indoors should never be the place. Using pee pads teaches puppies to go indoors - and then you need to somehow de-train that and teach them to go only outside. It is much faster and less confusing for the puppy with better results, not to use pee pads and to teach them to go outside from the start.
You can find our policy on underage puppies here: https://thelabradorforum.com/threads/forum-policy-on-underage-puppies.11455/. It was written in 2015 and to my recollection the rules have not changed in that time Here is the relevant section and as you can see it does not apply to Butters.
Hi @pippa@labforumHQ Some breeders ask buyers to come and play and help with the socialisation of the pup before taking her home at 2 months. Members might want assistance in how to do such a worthwhile task properly. I know it's a different issue, but the 8 week rule has to have many nuanced variations.
Definitely, it is not a straightforward issue, and it's one we are always happy to discuss and rethink. The original rule was set at a time when the main website and to some extent this forum, was being overwhelmed with requests for help from members that had purchased tiny pups (some as young as 21 days old) that had little or no chance of survival without immediate veterinary attention. Hopefully modern welfare standards are reaching more areas now as this kind of post does seem to be less common. And while most experts agree that puppies should be at least seven weeks age on adoption, there is disagreement about the pros and cons of seven weeks versus eight weeks. Even among experts. In general though, the consensus does seem to be coming down in favor of eight weeks as the best age for rehoming.
It's an interesting one. In the UK now, pretty much all reputable breeders won't home pups before 8 weeks. This seems to have changed a bit in the last decade - our Weimaraner was 7 weeks when we collected her, and that was pretty standard for the breed at the time. In the US, there are still lots of 'good' breeders homing pups at 7 weeks. Many Puppy Culture breeders keep pups later, because one theory is that there is a fear period which starts around 8 weeks so it's not an ideal time for them to go to new homes and be exposed to so much new stuff. Keeping pups till 9 weeks would avoid that.
Thr dog behaviourist Kathryn Lord reports that the marginal value of fear overtakes the marginal value of exploration at 8 weeks for dogs, at lesst the breeds investigated hy Scott and Fuller. In the Labrador she has found that fear overtakes the desire to explore at 9 weeks, one week later. Some Guides Dog associations take Labs at 7 weeks giving them 2 weeks in which the puppies have a desire to explore new environments. I'm not making an argument that all Labs should be taken home at 7 weeks. Just that it's not clear what is the optimal time to take home a puppy. And that the optimum is probably different for specific breeds, and the experience of the breeder and the new owner.
Totally. Also, I think whether the pup is going to a home with no other dogs or to a home with older well-socialised adult dogs plays a part too.
Both of our pups came home at about 49 days. I can't see any negative results from that, but of course every dog is different.
