Well, as usual, the past 12 weeks flew by! It feels like just yesterday I was nuzzling warm, still wet newborn puppies. Praying over them, in my cupped hands that had a couple of drops of frankincense essential oil on them. Imagining their future and looking forward to giving them enriched experiences as they grew. The last of the puppies went home yesterday – all the way to Canada in a carry on travel carrier with two very...
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The Last Two Weeks of the Critical Learning Period For Puppies The puppies are just a couple of days shy of 9 weeks old and are leaving or being scheduled to leave with their new families. While it is a very bitter/sweet time for us, it is a time of great excitment and more new learning experiences for the puppies and their new families. The new families are going to have their puppies for the last two and half to three weeks...
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Today was a big day for the puppies! Turning 7 weeks old means going through the testing exercises and matching up our observances of the puppies with test results to help determine which puppies will be the best fit for each family. We use the Volhard Puppy Aptitude Test. I look at these testing exercises more in a general way then as someting set in stone. After all, they don’t predict the very individual aspects of a dog. I...
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Dear past and future puppy owners, I loved your puppy first. I thought of you – future owner, years before you even realized you would one day have one of my puppies. I planned for and cared about your puppy long before you started thinking of adding a Poodle to your family. I thought and prayed about your future with that puppy; before you even knew there would be one. There were hours upon hours spent researching lines for...
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Did you know that talking to your puppy as you would to another human being and using verbal commands or names for objects and skills is a good way to increase your puppy’s vocabulary? It is a fact that dogs that are spoken to often over their lifetime; can have a vocabulary of over a hundred words. Our dogs have even learned the spelling of some words. When we say the words: Walk Cookie Treat Bed, Crate Let’s go Ball...
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Thankfully, we had about 4 days in a row this last week where it was not cold and rainy and the puppies got to be outside – running, wrestling and exploring! They sure slept well afterwards. LOL So, now we are back to playing indoors and working on some basic clicker training and conditioning them to new objects like the cloth tunnel, short steps, the wobble cushion and such. We have two of puppies reserved with a deposit...
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The Girls At 5 weeks old, their personalities are just beginning to come through but we are loving what we are seeing in both the boys and girls. We are now taking deposits from approved puppy applications. If you are interested in one of these wonderful puppies, please email us an application as soon as possible. We are very particular about where our puppies go. We want to be sure that you know what you...
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This is the first Winter litter that we have had in over 10 years and normally we get lots of pictures of the puppies when they are outside in the sunshine. It is too cold and wet out to have the puppies outside for more than a couple of minutes so we are not getting as many pictures as normal. We have a full spectrum light panel that we use daily and direct towards their pen and I will hold them individually and take them out to be...
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The puppies turned 5 weeks old this morning! They are getting better about using the litter box to go potty in and now that we have set up the exercise pen for them, they can jump in and out of the whelping box to play, explore and stretch their legs more often. I have shaved their faces and was really surprised to not find silver under the dark puppies hair! They may yet fade to blue but no silver it looks like. They were all...
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We have begun to work with the puppies individually for a few minutes at a time with a clicker and a little bit of ground beef rolled into tiny balls. First, we “click” and then we give the treat – classically conditioning the puppies to respond to the sound. The puppies learn in a pretty short time that the sound of the click ALWAYS means a yummy treat. We are not asking the puppy to do anything at this point, they...
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