The Neonatal Stage

When the puppies are first born, the stage between when the puppies are 0 to 2 two weeks old is called the Neonatal Stage.  When the puppies are born, they will have their eyes and ears closed and will weigh about a pound depending on the breed of the puppies.  The puppies won’t be able to do much in this stage except for crawl a little and nurse off their mother.  At this stage they won’t have teeth so when the puppies are nursing it won’t hurt the mother, but as the puppies start to gain their teeth you will find the mother will be more and more less willing to nurse.  The puppies won’t be able to regulate their own temperature so it’s best to keep them in a comfortable room setting but the mother will do her best to regulate their temperature for them. Between the time the mother has the puppies and to the time they are eight weeks old, the mother and pups should not be separated to ensure the puppies develop and grow appropriately.  When my dog had her puppies, she was confused and scared at first because she didn’t understand what has happening.  However, as I couched and helped her through it, her motherly instincts soon kicked in and she knew what to do.  My dog is a pure-bred Boarder Collie and she had 7 puppies over a period of about 4 hours.  The first 6 were perfectly happy, but when the last puppy came, the runt, he was a lot smaller than the rest of the pups and was very week.  This is very common when it comes to the runt in a bigger litter group, but my family was convinced to help him out.  The runt couldn’t nurse off the mother like his brothers and sisters because of how small and week he was.  We contacted our Vet to get her opinion and she told us the best thing would to try and help him latch onto the mother.  My mother and I tried for a couple of hours to get him to latch on, but he was just too weak.  Then we went to the store and bought milk supplement to try to bottle feed him but he was just too weak to even drink from a bottle.  We did all we could but the runt ended up dying.  He was just not fully developed yet and there was nothing anyone could do.  This can be common in litters of puppies it best to not blame yourself for what happens and realize you did the best you could.