Day 48 A.M. & P.M.

The end of my time with a litter always sneaks up on me — in just a week the puppies will have their pre-farewell veterinary exams and then they will be eight weeks and starting to leave us.

All of us.

As with previous litters, new families will be asked to provide an update/photos every week or so for a while so these can be shared on the blog to help with our collective Wildflower Withdrawal; blog analytics tell me that the Wildflowers have a Fan Club.

Today I want to invite the creation of another collaborative document — New Puppy Home Instructions. Based on your experience and knowledge what should new homes know about raising a Berner puppy? What advice did you receive that was great, dumb, impractical or invaluable?

This is a collaborative effort so you do not need to have a complete list — just email what comes to your mind as important (or not important) when raising a Berner puppy (sontag.bowman@gmail.com).

Send multiple emails if you continue to think of things over the week. I will plan to summarize our collaboration next weekend, and it will be a new page on our website.

Thank you for helping to support and foster community and collective wisdom around these puppies and their new families. They all deserve it.

One thing that will be on the list is the importance of considering and monitoring toys. I added those plastic things (from the play structure) back and they are a big hit BUT I am watching closely to make sure nobody gets obsessive about the cord.

Puppies can and do swallow all kinds of dangerous things. In general, rope toys are not a great idea and especially if they have stringy ends. Cloth toys need to be heavy duty fabric. If a piece can come off — or be chewed off — it is dangerous to a puppy.

And so I sit here and watch as I write/work/attempt to drink coffee before it gets cold. If I could not have this level of oversight, I would remove all toys — including the fabric tunnel — except kongs and the adult-sized nylabones.

See the “strings” on the tunnel? I watch it closely. With multiple puppies playing, the tunnel moves too much for any one puppy to start gnawing on the string but s/he likely would if alone with it.

I recently read an interesting study comparing dog age and human age — seven human years for every dog year is a myth. An eight-week-old puppy is roughly equivalent to a nine-month-old human.

This is helpful — consider the level of oversight you would provide to a nine-month-old infant who explores by putting everything in her mouth. With a human baby, we remove dangerous things, redirect, provide safe things to chew on, get bitten a few times, and understand it is a rare child who heads off to preschool still putting everything in her mouth.

The nature of development is that things change. Just as we do not need to teach human infants to stop putting everything in their mouths, so too does normal growth and development (and appropriate redirection) take care of puppy mouthing and biting.

Human infants who mouth and bite their parents do not grow up to be cannibals. Likewise, puppies who mouth and bite their humans do not grow up to be vicious. Our job is all about understanding what is normal, managing our expectations, and redirecting to safe and less painful options — with human infants and dog infants.