Taking Care of Newborn Puppies

Video Transcript

"Let's talk about raising newborn puppies. There are two kinds of version of this situation. One is if you have a newborn puppy and a functional mother. But very often unfortunately there may be a newborn puppy that doesn't have a mother. And so when you have a newborn with a mother, the mom generally is going to take over and raise that puppy as far as, you know, feeding it milk and that sort of thing. But most of the time what we're facing and talking about here is when you have an orphan. And so when these guys are very small and of course just starting out in life, they're very fragile. They need to be kept warm. They need to be kept stimulated from time to time also. And then they're feed milk. You can get puppy milk replacer from your veterinarian and sometimes from pet stores with little feeding bottles. And so it will tell on those type... on those bottles or on those cans how much to feed a puppy that's newborn. They generally need to eat about every two to four hours depending on how fast they're growing. They need that nutrition that often because they're burning up so much energy by growing. Generally speaking about four and a half to five weeks of age, you can start adding in like a wet food or a gruel type of food so they're starting to eat solids. And then by six weeks of age, generally you're starting to feed them regular puppy food. And then they're good to go from there. But newborns need that especially for those first few weeks, that milk nutrition over and over and over because they're burning up so much energy."