Day 45 A.M. & P.M.

The Wildflowers are conspiring to make the farewells slightly less awful. They are doing this by collectively demanding a change to my morning routine, which I find highly objectionable. There are, however, more of them than me — and the Montana Puppy Choir is LOUD.

And so their breakfast has been moved to precede my morning coffee. This is sorely testing my cheerful morning demeanor but luckily, they are cute and I know it is not forever.

On days like this when their meals are raw food, they need to eat individually to reduce the chances of making a mess and having raw food all over their heads. Gross. This individual meal service takes more time, further delaying the morning coffee.

After eating, the puppies head for the playroom (aka Living Room) — and I basically become a Bathroom Attendant at this point in the proceedings, which is not conducive to coffee drinking, FYI.

Eventually they settle down to play and I can feed the big dogs — and finally, make coffee.

It is hard to overstate how all-consuming it is raise a litter of puppies well.

My Fitbit tells me I average only about 6 1/2 hours of sleep per night and I get over 10k steps in a day just moving puppies around. I forget to answer emails (or worse — think I have answered them) and find it hard to concentrate on non-puppy things that need doing.

I am not actually complaining — I knew all this going in, after all.

One of my goals in blogging about this litter is to educate. Not only do I want to share information but I also want people to understand there is a big difference between a breeder who has the litter out in the barn or kennel, and one that pours her/his life into these eight weeks.

I hope it is also clear that it matters. Puppies are not blank slates when they arrive at their new homes — they are complex living creatures whose brains have been developing and getting “wired” for eight weeks.

It hurts my heart to imagine the stressed and/or deprived lives experienced by so many puppies and their mothers. Every puppy deserves to be raised as the Wildflowers have, but I know this is the exception because yes — it is hard and time-consuming.

You — the person looking for a puppy — can help change things.

Please insist on getting a puppy from parents who have ALL the recommended health testing/screening, and require the breeder show evidence of raising litters in intelligent, thoughtful, enriched ways.

Creating life should be done with integrity — and so should acquiring a puppy.

Please have a terrific — and ethical — day!

THIS is a morning video.

THIS is a lunchtime video.

EVENING: PHOTOS and Thoughts from the Day

Every time a puppy has a successful new experience, something marvelous happens in their developing brains.

Therefore, they need constant new experiences to master — not scary and new but doable and new.

As I have said before — what we want when something novel shows up (sprinkler moved to disk) is this…

And that happens when the new experience is appropriate AND the puppy has experience mastering new things.

Daisy has started to play with her babies, and I am reminded that it is normal for dog play to include their mouths…

We cannot really expect a puppy to NOT use her mouth — what we can expect is that she learn to do it gently…

Tonight each puppy had an individual training session. My specific goals were to take them to a new place and reinforce following.

I took each to two new places, put them down and walked away 5 - 6 steps. When they caught up, I gave them a treat (cooked egg) and went the other direction — repeat. If the puppy stayed with me, I reached down and rewarded every 3 - 4 steps.

I made sure to give the treat when the puppy had four feet on the ground — we do not want to inadvertently teach a puppy to jump up, which is what we do when we give treats when their front paws are up on us.

I also did not lure puppies to follow me — the treats were not to create the behavior but rather to reinforce the behavior.

All of the puppies did a great job following, and had no issue with the new places.