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Summary: Puppies can be held very early on, so long as the mother is calm and willing to allow it. Get puppies comfortable with human contact when they are very young with helpful information from a practicing veterinarian in this free video on puppy care.
Dr. Gregory McDonald earned his Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree from Ohio State University in 1979. Since then, he has continued his education in areas such as laser surgery,...read more
"Hello! I'm Dr. Greg McDonald. I'm a veterinarian in Southern California in Santa Barbara and I own McDonald Animal Hospital. Talk a little bit about raising puppies and when it's okay to start handling them. We think as long as the mother is very easy to deal with, it is probably a good idea to start handling the puppies very early. The more people that handle the puppies the better they become domesticated and the better pets that they make and so it's very important to start handling them early on. Every day we should be weighing them again as the necessity of handling them but you really need to know the mother because the mother is going to want to protect the puppies and if she feels threatened, you go too fast to pick a puppy up she may actually bite you to protect her puppies. So, it's usually a good idea to have one person go take mom for a walk and then weigh all the puppies and do the handling at that point in time. So, if you're picking them up under the chest they're pretty well-balanced like this but if you want to pick 'em up like this you can see obviously you're not picking them up very well and that can actually cause a puppy a little bit of distress and cause them to be scared possibly wiggle out of your hand and be hurt. A couple other things you may not want to do first of all I think it's very important that children of a certain age I think when they're about seven years of old of age it's good time when a child should understand that puppies are not little toys that they can pick up and throw around. So, I think there should always be some supervision but I think children under seven probably shouldn't be picking up the puppies and again they can pick 'em up the wrong way if you pick 'em up by leg or you pick 'em up by an ear, obviously that's going to be painful for the puppy and makes the puppy become fearful as an adult dog. And once again I think it's better that lots of people handle them but probably children under seven should be supervised and not really picking the puppies up."
eHow Article: When Can You Hold Puppies?
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