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“Can You Dig It?”
At their one-week mark, Paige and her mini-pack welcomed a new roommate into their neighbourhood. Faith and her six-boy entourage made their debut last Friday morning. To say the least, Paige was very excited and curious and didn’t sleep a wink through the entire whelping. She would waver between her own puppies and each new one that Faith produced. Paige would not settle until Faith and her crew were firmly entrenched in their own whelping box (with the door closed)!
Paige and her roomie are good friends and once Faith got back on her feet following the birth of her puppies, the two of them would go out on breaks together to work on creating an alternate residence for their puppies. Their tools of choice were their front paws which they used to attempt to forge a tunnel under some rocks in the yard. Lucky us – we got lots of practice with footbaths for the ladies.
Paige’s little ones are doing very well. They’re growing and developing in leaps and bounds. It’s always exciting for us when the puppies’ eyes open at around the 10-day mark. Many of the puppies’ critical organs including their brain are not fully formed and they will spend several weeks developing rapidly. Since the gestation period in dogs is short (63 days), the tradeoff is that puppies are quite helpless at birth. Biologists refer to species that produce immature dependent offspring as altricial, which means “to nurse, to rear or to nourish”. It refers to the need for the young of these species to be fed and taken care of for a long period of time. Puppies are born with their eyelids tightly shut because the eye itself is still developing and is extremely fragile. The closed eyelids serve as a barrier to protect the eyes from potential damage. Now that their eyes are open, it will take a few weeks before their eyes mature and their eyesight begins to approach normal. The puppies are also born functionally deaf since their ear canals are closed. While their ear canals begin to open at around the same time, the ears are much more fully formed than the eyes and their hearing will be quite acute within a week or so.
At first glance, it may appear that the puppies spend all of their time sleeping, but they actually spend a good deal of time exercising. As but as they lay there asleep, they are constantly twitching. These involuntary actions, referred to as “activated sleep”, help strengthen their leg muscles and begin to build muscle mass. This allows them to plod around on all fours when they’re in search of their mom for a snack.
That’s it for now, but be sure to join us next week for another riveting installment of “Puppy Tales”.
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