Puppies

Hi, everybody. Claire here from Van Isle Labradoodles, and today, we’re really excited to be able to introduce you to the newest members of our Van Isle Labradoodle family, the Blonde Brownie litter puppies. These medium multi-generation Australian Labradoodle puppies were born on October 20th, and we can’t wait to show you all their unique qualities.

So Labradoodles are known for many, many different things. One of the things that they’re very well known for is that they have a large variety of colors and a large variety of patterns. This litter, the Blonde Brownies litter, is what we call a rainbow litter. That means that all the Labradoodle puppies in this litter are different colors. Oh, my goodness. They’re making quite a racket here. That’s all of them at the milk bar. If they feel they aren’t getting their fair share, they have a lot to say about it. So a rainbow litter is a litter of puppies with lots of different colors and lots of different patterns. As you can see in this litter, we have a really good selection. The only color that isn’t represented here is cream which is what Spirit herself is. So Spirit, even though she is actually an apricot, she shows up as cream. She carries for all these different colors. So that means, depending on what stud we pair her with, we get a different variety of colors and patterns.

So this litter has a few unique features. One of them is what we call a dual-sired litter. In a dual-sired litter, that means we have two possible fathers. So we had planned for Spirit to honeymoon with Trip this time. Trip is a rookie. This was his first honeymoon, and he is still a younger fella. So he got distracted fairly easily and wasn’t feeling too comfortable in his role. So we called in a backup and that’s our Hombre. Hombre’s got lots of experience and he knows what he’s doing so we knew for sure we would be able to give all the families on this list a puppy.

So you can see the puppies are quite a unique range of colors and patterns, but both Hombre and Trip carry for all of those so we’re not able to tell who’s the daddy yet. So what we’ll do is, at about three, three and a half weeks of age, we’ll do a DNA swab and we do that just by inserting the swab in their cheeks, do a little roll, and then we send the swabs off to the lab. Then they’re confirm parentage for us. So when the puppies are about four or five weeks old, then we’re going to know who belongs to which daddy. So it’s kind of fun. It’s another exciting little part of the litter progression for our families and for us too.

So in this litter, we have sables, we have parties, we have phantoms, and we have a tri. Those are all really unique and fairly rare colors within the Australian Labradoodle world. So we’re pretty excited as Labradoodle breeders to have this stunning litter. Spirit herself, as you can see, she’s really relaxed. She’s very calm and content with her little family here. She’s doing a great job with them. She’s not fussed at all about anything. She hasn’t lost any weight. Her coat is still lovely and glossy and she’s not losing any hair or anything. Part of that is from her pre-pregnancy routine that we have for her and her pregnancy routine. All our dogs eat a 100% raw diet, and that does help to keep them in really good condition. So it’s important to us that our girls are really healthy throughout their pregnancy and afterwards.

Feeding eight little faces like this is a lot of work for our girl. So right now, Spirit’s consuming about 300% more than her normal calorie intake. She has a good selection of items. She has some homemade chicken. She has her usual raw. She’s currently eating a healthy, healthy portion of dried sardines, and she has a calcium supplement that we give her as well. So she’s doing great. She’s happy. She likes being outside. She’ll come outside with me for 10 minutes. She’ll leave these little guys alone for up to 10, 15 minutes at a time.

So they’re all nursing here as you can see and I don’t like to disturb them too much when they’re nursing, but what we’ll do maybe is just go across the row here while they’re nursing and let you know a little bit about their unique features. Then probably by the time we get to the end of the row, they’ll be tired out. It doesn’t take long to fill their small tummies.

So starting over here, we have Mr. Brown Collar. Mr. Brown Collar is a boy and he is a sable. You can see his face is a very dark chocolate whereas his body is a beautiful light golden caramel color. So this is one of the hallmark traits of a sable. What makes a sable is darker tips on the coat. Sometimes those tips will be in a cluster such as on the face and also you can see on his tail here, it’s darker, and also through his body but to a much lesser extent. You can see he has a dark line down his back and that’s fairly common for sables.

Here’s Ms. Yellow Collar. She has stopped nursing so we’re going to use her as an example to show you a little bit more of a sable. So Yellow Collar girl is also a sable, and you can see that that face is a little bit of a dark chocolate color whereas the body is this gorgeous golden caramel shade. She also has the cutest little white tiptoes. Just adorable. So what will happen with the sable is, as time goes on, the darker coloring here on her face will what we call clear out and she’ll end up being this beautiful, gorgeous, gorgeous golden caramel color. She is going to be a looker. Well they’re all going to be good lookers.

Then here we have Mr. Green Collar. He has also stopped nursing for a second. Now, Mr. Green Collar, he is my favorite color, black. I just love the deep richness of the ebony color dogs. What really sets them off beautifully are his little white markings. So you can see he’s got those cutesy, cutesy, cutesy little white tiptoes and he also has a little white goatee. The white goatee that he has is courtesy of his grandma. Bijou’s puppies all have little goatees, and they’re just the cutest little things. This fellow who’s falling asleep in my arms also has a beautiful white chest. So he is just going to be fabulous when he’s mature with those beautiful white markings to set off that deep, deep, rich blackness. You can see how much he gleams. So we’ll put him back down here. Over here, we have this little girl here. She’s also black. This is Ms. Gray Collar. We’ll just see if she’s willing to come up and meet everybody. She is another very unique thing in Labradoodle colors and patterns. Oh, she’s objecting. She didn’t really want to come up, I guess. She’s what we call a phantom. So you can see how she has tan points on the front of her paws and on the side of her face. I won’t keep her too long because she’s not enjoying that so we’ll put her back down. A phantom has markings that are similar to a Doberman or a Rottweiler. The tan is on their legs, on the side of their face, on their chest. She also has white. So that makes her a particularly unique girl. That’s what we call a tricolor phantom.

Over next to her at the end here, you’ll see there’s another party dog. This is another unique marking that Labradoodles have. A party is two colors. You can see she is brown and white. She has gorgeous big white ruff here around her neck, and she has some pretty little white markings here on her, on the sides of her hind legs and then the cute little white tip on her tail. Right now, we can’t see her face. I’m just going to help Gray Collar here go over and find an empty spot at the milk bar here because she’s objecting. Can’t quite see her face probably, but she has beautiful total symmetrical markings on her face.

The other party in this litter is this one here, Mr. Black Collar. He’s a black and white party. You can see there’s quite a difference between the brown and white party girl and the black and white party boy. Black and white party boy is what we call an extreme. By an extreme, we mean that most of his body is white. So his black markings are on his head. He has a lot of white on his face, and then he has black on his bum and on his tail. He has a really interesting tail pattern. Normally with a party, you get a tail like this, solid with the white tip, but you can see in his solid bit, he’s got a swoop of white there. So it’s kind of cute and makes him unique.

In between the two parties, this is Ms. Purple Collar girl here. She is the only puppy in the litter that is solid. She has no white on her at all, and she’s chocolate most likely. She could be a sable, but I think she’s probably just a regular nice beautiful dark rich chocolate color. So that’s their interesting colors and features and patterns.

Right now, the puppies are all blind. Most people know that puppies are born with their eyes sealed shut and their eyes will stay shut until they’re about 10 days to two weeks old, but what a lot of people don’t realize is that the puppies are also born with their ears sealed shut. That means that they also can’t hear. So their ears tend to open up after their eyes so usually around three weeks time, they can start to hear. The other thing they can’t do on their own yet is eliminate. So Spirit looks after that for them. She stimulates them while she’s cleaning them and that’s, for now, how they eliminate on their own. Again, around the three-week mark, they’ll start going on their own.

So with the puppies right now, we like to make sure that they learn already that people are great and that people are good. So we do a couple of things with them each day. One of the things we do with them … We’ll use little chocolate party girl here as our example so you can see her beautiful face and there’s her gorgeous symmetrical markings and her little white on her head. So what we do is called scenting. We hold the puppies right up to our neck and we let them snuggle right into our neck and they can smell and they know it’s us because the only sense they have right now is smell. So everything is done by smell. So this way they learn this is comfort, this is good. We talk when we’re holding them so that they get the vibrations from our chest. Even though they can’t hear, they’re having some sensory stimulation.

The other thing we do with them is we make them do something just a tiny little bit uncomfortable each day such as this. We just put their head down for a brief second. All that does is teach them that unexpected things may occur during the day, but nothing bad comes of it. We think that it helps them probably become better adjusted and happier, calmer puppies in the future.

So that’s our litter from Spirit, Trip, and Hombre. We hope you enjoyed this video. Please like the video if you did and subscribe to our channel so that you can follow this litter along as they grow up. They won’t be going home to their families until just after Christmas so we’ll have lots of updates and information. It’s so much fun to watch them grow. Nothing is more fun than seeing them as they develop. In a couple of weeks from now when their eyes open, that’s when they really start to develop their own personalities.

Right now, I can tell you that this puppy here, Green Collar boy, the black one, he’s the big talker in the group. When he isn’t where he should be, he lets us know. You already heard that Gray Collar girl is also quite vocal when she’s not getting what she wants. Purple Collar girl who’s right here, she’s the one who is the smartest at figuring out how to get the best spot at the milk bar. She’s almost always back here and this nipple, and she knows how to be very quick and come around from underneath and behind and get that favorite spot of hers. So it’s interesting to see how they already know how to work with things and how to survive in life the best that they can.

So next week, we’ll have another update for you. We’ll see how the puppies have progressed. We’ll also check their weights again. We do check their weights every day right now so it’ll be interesting to see how much they’ve gained in a week rather, not in a weight, and just to see how they’ve grown. So we hope you enjoy this video. Please put any comments and questions you might have below. We’re happy to answer them all. Thanks for watching. See you again next week.