Natural Puppy Care

Natural puppy care for your new addition will give your puppy a foundation for a healthy, long life as part of your family. Good natural nutrition is once again, the foundation of a long, healthy life. Of course, knowing what to feed the puppy and how often are key.

Young puppies (2 to 4 weeks) need nutrition that mimics mother's milk. If the mother dog is unable or unwilling to nurse her young, it is the care giver's responsibility to ensure that puppies get the right balance of nutrients at the proper frequency. Newborn puppies require approximately 33% protein, 44% fat, 16% carbohydrate and 7% ash in their diets. While Dr. Pitcairn's New Complete Guide to Natural Health for Dogs and Cats recommends a recipe of supplemented goat's milk, many experts in the care of newborn pups recommend a milk substitute called Esbilac powder with colostrum, a formula designed to perfectly mimic the nutritional content in mother's milk. These experts feel that the potential for milk-related diarrhea in young puppies is to great and diarrhea when a puppy is vulnerable could be fatal.

Young puppies require feeding every 2 hours, until their bellies are firm, but not distended. It's better to feed a little less than the pup desires as overfeeding can cause milk to get into the lungs causing pneumonia. Do not microwave the milk, but rather place the bottle in a bowl of hot water and heat to 99-100 degrees F. As a puppy reaches 3 weeks of age, solid food may be encouraged. By 4 weeks of age, feedings are 4 times daily.

Now you know how often to feed; what about how much? The tendency can be to overfeed puppies and for the reasons mentioned above, overfeeding must be avoided. Puppies should be fed according to age and weight. A 1-week old pup requires 13ml per 100 g of weight (that's .44oz milk for every 3.5 oz of weight); a 2-week pup requires 17ml of milk per 100g of weight (.57 oz for every 3.5oz of weight); a 3-week pup needs 20ml of formula per 100g of weight (.68oz per 3.5oz of weight) and a 4-week puppy would receive 22ml of formula per 100g of weight (.74oz per 3.5oz of weight).These quanities may be mixed prepared daily and divided equally for each feeding (12 to 4 per day.) My advice is to obtain a bottle with metric measures clearly marked and a scale with both metric and US weight measurements included. (If this isn't possible, then www.onlineconversion.com offers an easy-to-use calculator.)

When it comes to the puppy's elimination, in the absence of mom-dog, the caregiver must stimulate elimination by wetting a cotton ball with warm water and gently stroking the anal region with the cotton ball, mimicking what the mother dog would do with her tongue.

Puppies will ideally remain part of the litter for at least four to six weeks and this is important, not just in the nutritional sense but in the sense that your puppy receives valuable social skills when with her litter mates. For more on natural puppy socialization click here.

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