Will Hand Raised Puppies Grow To Healthy Dogs?

[Aso]

Hi All.

We are waiting on a puppy and our breeder is having a lot of trouble with the litter at the moment because the mom has an infection and have no milk. She had a litter of 9 and is now hand feeding all the puppies, unfortunately a couple have been lost. Our breeder is quite stressed and has not had more than a few hours sleep since the puppies came along. I hope that everything goes well from here on, for the sake of our breeder mainly because she would do anything for her puppas.

Well I'm sure everything will turn out fine because we have an awesome breeder with awesome puppas but is there anything additional that we need to do when we finally get our bubba home? It's still 7+ a bit weeks away but I want to make sure we're prepared for everything. I'm sure our breeder will keep us very well informed of everything we need but I'm still a tad nervous about it and would like to be prepared.

Can you please share your experiences with your very own hand-raised puppies?

Thank you so very much in advance.

[Guest donatella]

Many Poms are hand raised because they are born so tiny and need extra tlc. I know of one breeder who has grand champions that were bottle fed babies I cant see any reason why they would be any different once past the dangerous phase and are little fatties.

[ellz]

In the righthands, there is absolutely no reason why a hand raised puppy cannot be every bit as healthy as one reared by a canine mum.

[Dogsfevr]

In the righthands, there is absolutely no reason why a hand raised puppy cannot be every bit as healthy as one reared by a canine mum.

+1

The only other main difference i find is there exceptionally people crazy.

[Aso]

That all sounds very good indeed. We can't wait to get our puppa home & these are just all good news :-)

showdog what do you mean by exceptionally people crazy? He's going to be a BIG dog :-)

[dancinbcs]

Hand raising is not really hard on the puppies and makes no difference socially to them unless it is a singleton, especially if the bitch will still mother them, even if she can't feed them. It does make a huge difference to the breeder though. Has she put out an appeal for a foster mum? I know someone who had one available early in the week but it was only a small breed.

[Kirislin]

My whippet Kibah had a litter of 9 (7 survived) by caesarian. She was kept in the clinic for a couple of days so I had to take the puppies home. I managed to foster 4 off to another whippet bitch for 4 weeks, but the other surviving 3 stayed with me. They didn't even get colostrum, I hand raised them myself, no knowing the first thing about it.

That was over 10 years ago and all "puppies" are still alive :D One is my very own Feather.

I hope she still lets the bitch clean them and interact with them because that is important for the puppies development. At around 6 weeks old the bitch starts to rought the puppies up, and roll them to teach them to submit, and probably a whole lot of other stuff that was too subtle for me to pick up at the time, but I know it's important training by the mum.