I let the puppies out day before yesterday to play around the farmyard. Here are some pictures I got.  Later that evening I had Black, Olive and Yellow inside so I could set their ears. Click on any picture to get  larger view.

It was getting closer for Miss Coco (purple) to leave. I wanted to start getting her used to being away from her siblings. Being inside with only people. I brought her in to be with me for the afternoon. She was not very happy with the idea. She is not quite as people oriented as some of the other pups. I played with her and gave her all sorts of goodies but she really wasn’t interested. Mostly she sat by the door and whined. I noticed that part of the problem was the heat. She had a lovely warm coat for living outside. Compared to that inside was sweltering! I made a note to trim her before she went home. I brought her in a few more times that day. She was doing better by the end of the day. Last night really changed things. I took just her on a visit to one of my friends. This friend had a cat, Chance. Coco knew sometime about cats. Our cat Tansy had given her a good lesson a few weeks earlier. Chance on the other hand, didn’t know about dogs. Coco was very respectful. She gave very nice dog speak saying she wasn’t a threat. It was delightful to watch to them communicate over the course of the evening. They didn’t get to the friend stage but Coco was so polite that the cat eventually unruffled and would play on the bed where he could keep an eye on Coco.
It was also very endearing to watch Coco getting tired. She was so like a little kid. Very tired but not quite ready to settle down to sleep. I had brought a snuggle blanket but that wasn’t quite good enough. She found my jacket on the couch. She pulled it off. That was great fun. But she was still very tired. She mouthed it for a while. I didn’t take it away from her. This was not in anyway destructive chewing. It was like a little kid sucking his thumb. Pretty soon she fell asleep snuggled down in my jacket. I was dearly wishing for my camera. It make a sweet picture. We had more snuggle time on the 30 minute drive home. When I went out to get her this morning she came right to me. When I set down with her in the house she stayed with me and gave me gentle kisses. It’s hard to let them go when you’ve started to bond. But I felt much better about letting her go. Our hearts had met and what I found reassured that she would be just fine with her new people. Be well Coco, you are in good hands!

I took two girls, Pink and Purple and two boys, Yellow and Olive, over to a friends house yesterday to visit her and her two dogs. They even better than I’d hoped! Immediately upon setting them down they were all over the place checking the new house out and greeting the strange dogs. I at least expected them to pause when I first set them down. But no, it was high gear the whole way. It took a while for my friend’s dogs to warm up to the puppies. But when they did it was great watching them play.

If you are going to switch your pup from raw to dry I would start by just adding a little dry food as a third meal. Then start adding a little at the beginning of the other two meals, your pup will not be as hungry for the raw food and you can gradually start fading it out. I recommend using a brand of dry food that is grain free, that has two or more meats as the first ingredients and has 30% or higher protein level. That is the closest dry food can get to raw. Orijen, Core by Wellness, EVO, Taste of The Wild, Go! Natural and Barking at The Moon by Solid Gold are a few good ones.
There is a wonderful resource that publishes a list of the best dry foods each year. The Whole Dog Journal is definitely worth subscribing to! http://www.whole-dog-journal.com

I also recommend that you continue your pup on Nuvet Plus, a nutritional supplement. If you feed raw it is not such a big deal but if you feed dry food then pup will be sure of getting the live vitamins and minerals that he needs. I have been bugging the Nuvet director I talk to get more information in print about the fact that the supplement is cold processed. That is what convinced me to use this supplement over others. Heat kills live goodness and live nutrition is what living creatures need for optimum health. When I learned that Nuvet was a cold processed supplement I knew that their wonderfully impressive list of ingredients would actually be helping my dogs. I knew it would also be something that I could wholeheartedly recommend to others. I will be uploading a page to my website about Nuvet in the near future. Till then you can check out their website at www.nuvet.com. I include information and a sample in each puppies care package.

The pups are given one conventional worming. The rest of the time I use a natural chemical free wormer called Diatomaceous Earth (food grade only of course!). It works by mechanical means, cutting the soft skin of the parasite so they dry out and die and then get eliminated by the host animal. This website has a wealth of information on this product and its many uses. http://wolfcreekranch1.tripod.com/defaq.html

I try to keep vaccines to a minimum, since I believe they do more harm than good.  The only vaccines my Airedales are given is rabies, as required by law. I strongly recommend that the puppies be kept on a no vaccine or limited vaccine regime. I do urge that if vaccines are to be given that they be given singly and at least two weeks apart.

The pups are doing wonderfully. It’s easy to forget that they are dogs. The cold has settled back in but it doesn’t faze them a bit. I was worried about them the other night, it was cold and the wind was howling. That was till I went out to check and found them romping around outside like it was mid summer! I gave them some hay to snuggle in and went to bed reassured. I make sure their food is warm of course. But otherwise they don’t need any special help with the cold. Just a draft free bed. I went out to give them an early lunch today and they were all outside snoozing in the sun in their little slide fort. It was 5 degrees out.