How to Assess Newborn Puppy Health

Series Summary

Owning a pet can be an extremely satisfying endeavor, and so it is no wonder that millions of people around the world keep companion animals in their lives. The most common pets are by far, cats and dogs, however, the rising popularity of exotic pets has led to an increase of people owning snakes, lizards, rats, mice, and hamsters. Fish are also a popular pet for people who do not want too much responsibility. Studies have shown that owning a pet is actually beneficial to both the mental and physical health of the owner. In fact, there are now medically backed studies showing that therapy animals can significantly improve the well being of many patients.

There's nothing cuter than a newborn puppy, but caring for a young puppy takes a lot of time and commitment, as well as knowledge of proper care techniques. In this free video series our expert vet technician will show you how to care for a newborn puppy. You will get tips on how to assess the health of a newborn puppy, how to help a newborn puppy use the bathroom and how to keep a puppy warm. You will also learn what to feed a newborn puppy and how to feed the puppy. Finally, get tips on caring for older puppies and some general information on puppy growth stages. If you are interested in caring for a newborn puppy let our expert show you everything you need to know and then go out and volunteer at an animal shelter!

Video Transcript

"Hello. My name is Megan Webb. I'm here in Oakland, California at the Oakland Animal Shelter where I am the Volunteer Manager. Today I'm going to show you how to care for a very new, brand new puppy. We're going to start just as if this puppy just came into the shelter and we're going to start from assessing it. The first thing that you want to do when you first have a puppy is make sure your hands are washed. You want to perfectly wash them in disinfectant soap. The next thing we're going to do is we're going to take the puppy and we want to make sure we look at it carefully. Puppies have fairly, their immune systems are not great at this age. We don't know what the history of this puppy is, where its mother came from, and so we want to prevent it from getting ill or sick. So my hands are washed, I have a clean surface, and I'm going to take this puppy out and I'm going to look at him. And where is this puppy? This puppy is right here. Here's the puppy. Okay, so we have a brand new puppy here and I'm going to do some, a few things just to kind of get a sense of how old this puppy is. First I'm going to look at him and I'm going to see that her little eyes are open. Once a puppy's eyes are open, we know the puppy's at least ten days old. Their eyes open approximately ten days of age. You can also see that this puppy is not walking yet. They start doing crawling about three weeks of age. And then I'm also going to look, I'm going to sex this puppy. It's a little female. And I'm going to see that there's, she's looking pretty alert and lively and you can see, I don't know if you can see here, but she has a large, wide tongue. The tongue is frilled at the edges and that's because it's basically used to, when she's nursing. So this is a definitely, this puppy is a nursing puppy. She also has her ears are folded down and closed, so she is a very young puppy. I would say probably about twelve days old. So we've now aged this puppy and we know that this one is going to need to be bottle fed."