How to Put Weight on a Puppy

Video Transcript

"Hello! I'm Dr. Gregory McDonald. I'm a veterinarian from Southern California in Santa Barbara and I work at McDonald Animal Hospital. I want to talk a little bit about newborn puppies and we do want to watch their weight. We mention before a previous segment about them gaining weight everyday and it's important to weigh them. Now, one of the things that we do find in a large litter, mother may not be making enough milk so these puppies are actually thinner than what they should be and so one of the things that we do is to supplement them with a product called Esbilac. Esbilac is what we call a bitch milk replacer and you can buy it at any pet store and it's good to kind of have that available . You can buy it as a dry powder and mix it up for your puppies and it's good if they start to lose weight they're not gaining weight fast enough possibly because they're too many puppies or the mother is not making enough milk, you can supplement it. Once the puppies get to be about four weeks of age, you can start adding some solid food to them and what we like to do is to take one of the really good quality puppy chows and that means it's specifically designed for puppies and then mix it up with the Esbilac into a gruel, put it in your blender and make it into a gruel and maybe three or four times a day you put that down in a kind of a sheet and let the puppies kind of lick it and they'll wander through it and lick their paws and lick it and get used to eating it and you have to kind of the wash the puppies after each feeding. But it's nice to start them in on solid food at about four weeks of age, in this way you'll be sure that they continue to gain weight and thrive."