|
After
a few minutes I was able to calm him down. I found out that the
puppy was a three-week-old male suffering from severe seizures. They
had just weaned him today with a mixture of condensed cow’s milk.
The puppy would not eat from the mother and now the mother was
continually pushing the puppy away from her. Boy, did this ring a
bell in my head. This same thing happened to us last October. Our
litter was progressing perfectly - almost too perfectly. The puppies
looked great. They were gaining weight every day; everything seemed
fine. Then we started to wean them at about three and one-half weeks
of age. We don’t just all of a sudden take the puppies away from the
mother. Rather, we do it slowly by building a little box in front of
the kennel which allows the puppies access to the food in it but the
mother cannot get to the food. Then, slowly, as the puppies desire,
they wean themselves away from the mother. We have found that this
creates a stress-free weaning process. But what happened in this
particular situation is that one of the male puppies in our litter
on his first day with supplemented food ate too much food too
quickly and ended up with colic. The gas from undigested food began
to build up in his little stomach and he began to panic. He ran all
over the whelping box in circles, crying, then screaming. We tried
to hold him but it did no good. Next he went into uncontrollable
convulsions; with each twitch and scream I began to panic. I ran to
my husband for advice. He began reading in the veterinary journals
he has. The most prominent symptom was his seizures so that was our
starting point. Of the various possible diseases, the worst case
scenario was Herpes, but none of the other puppies seemed affected
and we had never had this problem before. My husband then asked what
we had done differently today from other days and I told him that we
had started whelping the puppies today. With a little more research
we came up with the most possible explanation; that the puppy got
colic from eating too much too quickly; then, as the undigested food
sat in his stomach his blood-sugar began to drop, he became
hypoglycemic and the seizures started. We had to get his blood-sugar
up so we began feeding him a mixture of pedialite, which can be
purchased at any drugstore or supermarket, Karo syrup, and half of
an aspirin. We fed him with an eye-dropper every hour for the next
twelve hours. It is very important to note that a puppy in this
state cannot have any milk substitute or mother’s milk until he is
stabilized. |
|
We
held this puppy all night, feeding him this mixture, taking his
temperature, and holding him close against our bodies while he went
through his seizures. When the morning sun crept through the windows
over our bed and woke us we found that the puppy’s temperature was
now normal and the seizures had stopped. This story was one of the
ones that had a happy ending. The puppy went on to become one of the
best males we have ever produced. |
|
I
went through this same scenario of events with the couple on the
telephone. They seemed relieved to share their problem with someone
else. They tried our suggestions and the next morning we got one of
those phone calls that make breeding all worthwhile. The little
puppy that last night had been sentenced to death was now alive and
well and feeding once again on his mother. One word of advice that I
would share with you is don’t be in such a hurry to wean your
puppies. Let nature take its course and proceed on a slow, stable
basis. Whenever I am pressed to make a decision on our dogs I always
think how this would be done in the wild. And, I honestly feel that
whelping in the wild would be done on a gradual, step-by-step basis. |
