How to Take Care of Puppies

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Dr. Gregory McDonald. I'm a veterinarian in Southern California and I own McDonald Animal Hospital. I want to talk a little bit about the way to get ready for puppies when you're going to have puppies, your female dog is pregnant about ready to have puppies there's some special things that you need to do. First of all it's very important that you veterinarian speak with you about special vitamins that your dog should be on. Young dogs that are having puppies oftentimes get a lot in calcium so they should be supplemented with a calcium product before. But there's a special area that the dog should be confined in, it's called a whelping box. Again, what's very curious about dogs is when they're first giving birth they don't understand what's going on and actually until the puppies start to nurse, once they nurse they release some hormones and all of a sudden they have a lot of maternal instinct. It's important to keep them in an area that you can keep clean. I think it's a good idea to put something like newspapers down and you have to be very careful that's there's not some newspaper that's going to have a lot of ink on it if the puppy start to eat the newspaper. It would be better to have blankets or towels in there and again if you have towels in there you can pull them out two or three times a day, run them through your washing machine and put them back down again and keep the area extremely clean. I think that you also have to be very concerned about temperature because newborn puppies are not able to control their own temperature 'till they're about six weeks of age and so if it gets too cold and mother takes a long walk, the puppies could get chill so you want to be able to keep the ambient temperature in the room that they're in a reasonable temperature and that should be probably around seventy degrees would be ideal. Once again, puppies aren't able to control their own temperature for so you need to keep them in a temperature controlled environment. This is a special water heating pad that is extremely safe for puppies. A regular electric heating pad if they were unable to get off of it could get too hot. This one is especially controlled. It has a thermostat over here that you can set so if you're very careful and do some planning there's lots of good information and some books and also on the Internet on how to make a whelping box and how to maintain a clean environment for your new puppies."