Puppies

Hi everybody. We are going to do the week five update today for the Shake it up Litter. In this litter are medium sized multi generation Australian Labradoodle puppies from Van Isle Doodles. Today, we’re going to meet each of the puppies, give a little bit of an update on the puppies, and then we’re going to talk a little bit about nutrition just briefly and then we’re going to talk about how to deal with travel sickness.

Tanner is going to hand me all of the puppies and then she’ll take them off and then we’ll go on and talk a little bit about other things. We’re going to start off with our first puppy and we have Peach Collar Girl. Peach Collar Girl is the smallest puppy in this litter and she is an absolute angel. She is a very sweet, quiet and very calm puppy, really nice even temperament and a real super little love bug. She likes nothing better than to be held, and you can see how very calm and very placid she is. She takes all new situations in strides and never worries about anything. That’s our little Peach Collar Girl.

Next we have one of the black puppies here, and this is Gray Collar Girl. Gray Collar Girl is also a real sweetheart in terms of being very soft and gentle and a quiet puppy. She is a little bit more outgoing than Peach Collar is but still a very nice, calm, mild mannered little girl. She doesn’t get fussed about too many things and she’s quite happy as well when you come and pick her up and give her a little bit of a snuggle. She really enjoys that. That’s Gray Collar Girl.

Next, we have one of the bigger puppies here, and this is who used to be Green Collar Boy but is now Black Collar Boy and the reason why he has a different Collar number is because when we moved into their bigger puppy size collars, we didn’t have one in green so he became black and Green Collar Boy is one of the puppies who was originally with Hazel but now he’s back with everybody in his litter. Green Collar Boy is one of the puppies who can be quite vocal. He’s quite happy to tell me in the morning that, “Hey, I’m hungry. I think it’s time to be fed. Where’s my mommy? What’s going on?”, so I think he’s going to be a puppy who’s just excellent at being good at communicating with his humans because he’s not shy about letting his feelings be known at all, so that is Green, now Black Collar Boy.

Next here, we have Purple Collar, hello sweetheart. Purple Collar has this beautiful black face and she has these gorgeous phantom highlights on her eyebrows and you can just see the phantom coloring starting to come through on the side of her face as well. Purple Collar is our major communicator. She yells at me. When she wants to be fed in the morning, it isn’t a hint that maybe she’s hungry. It’s a full on, “Hey, get over here. I am starving.” She is always telling us what needs to be changed or what it is that she’d like. I think that probably as time goes on, that’s going to change a little bit and she’ll be a little bit more quiet but she has lots of confidence and she is a very outgoing puppy.

That’s Purple Collar. Now we just have to wait for a minute for Taylor to get some more because we have 11 puppies. We don’t have them all out here at the same time. One thing that’s happened with the litter in the past week is that they have all moved to starting to be weaned. Breezy now is only in with them for a maximum of three minutes and she’s only been with them three times a day. By the end of this week, she will be not in with them at all. She’s going home to her guardian family on Saturday, and so that’s why we started the weaning process.

Taylor’s back now with the next group of puppies, so we’ll give her Purple and over here, we have Dark Blue Collar. Now Dark Blue Collar is different looking than all of the other puppies because he has these beautiful, beautiful sable coloring, or she rather not he, she has this gorgeous sable coloring so she is unique out of the litter in that she’s the only one that is not black or black and white and I think she knows that she’s special.

Where you see the black markings around her eyes and on her ears now, those will probably all fade out or clear out as we like to call it and she’ll just be that really pretty copper tan color along with her white, so she’s a pretty girl. Now Miss Dark Blue Collar is a very affectionate puppy. You may have seen the pictures from our family visit last week and she was all snuggled up with one of the mummies to be that we had here visiting. She really lives for snuggles and being held, super affectionate little puppy. That’s Dark Blue Collar.

Now we got one of the black babies and this is Light Blue Collar. Hello, Light Blue. Light Blue is again one of the smaller puppies in the litter and Light Blue, although right now is very quiet and calm, tends to be quite an outgoing little puppy, very lively, full of fun and energy, always exploring. Light Blue also really enjoys chewing on the bones and playing tug with some of the toys, quite an adventuresome little puppy. I expect when we start putting the puppies outside, that Light Blue will be one of the ones who’s first outside.

Taylor’s just gone off to get the next group again. When Breezy goes home on Saturday, the puppies will be old enough to start going outside, and so we’ll see them going through the doggie door, learning that they’re already eating really well. They’ve moved from the pablum and goat’s milk mixture more now to raw meat mixed with still some goat’s milk and some pumpkin but they aren’t eating any problem anymore now that they’re they’re grown up kids. We find after the family visit, that’s when all the puppies start to make a big transition and become a little bit more grown up type of dog.

Here’s Taylor again, and now, next puppy we have here is Orange Collar. Orange Collar is one of the beautiful shiny black puppies, and Orange Collar is also a super affectionate dog, very much the type of dog who responds well to humans, really enjoys being cuddled and snuggled and takes a lot of comfort and gains confidence from being around people, just a really nice, nice loving puppy. Orange is quite adventuresome as well. Orange enjoys playing with the toys and is really, really fond of the lamb neck bones. That’s something that is always the first thing that Orange Collar goes for when they’re out. That’s our little Orange Collar, baby.

Next, we’ve got one of the bruisers from the litter, and this is Yellow Collar Girl and she is one of the bigger puppies is. She is one of the extreme parties, which means that her body is all white and the only colors that we have her on her head. When you can see that she has these beautiful tan points here, and also on the side of her face, you can see the tan points there too. Those are the phantom markings that we often talk about, sable, phantom. I’m not sure without doing a DNA test, whether her markings are from sable or if they are the phantom pattern. Normally when we have phantom, we would see it across the chest and on the legs as well but with these puppies, because they’re full parties and white, we would not see that marking because they would be invisible.

It’s really interesting to learn all about the different colors and the and the different patterns and this litter is a good representation obviously of party. Bow says oh my goodness, we’re just exhausted, so you can see this is a very typical Labradoodle thing to do where they fall over and get their tummies rubbed and Yellow Collar also wants to be playing a little bit with the slice of pizza here. She’s just having a good time but you can see how strongly they interact with people, and how much they’re really relating to the human contact now, and again after the family visit, we always find that that comes very much to the forefront.

That’s Yellow Collar and Taylor’s just coming back now with the next couple of puppies here for us to take a look at. We’ll just give her back Yellow and here is our other big fella. This is Mr. Brown Collar. Mr. Brown Collar is the biggest puppy in the litter. He is the super suck of the litter. He just is the big gentle giant. He is so sweet and soft and such a loving boy. He forms really strong bonds with whatever person he’s with and all he wants to do is hang on tight. He has this adorable two colored ear where he has the party pattern in his ear, so he has black and white on his ears, which is really quite interesting and really quite a pretty little pattern. He’s almost an extreme but not quite because he does have his black marking there. That’s our big fellow from the litter and our great big love bug too, hey sweetie.

Here we have Red Collar Girl. Red Collar is the opposite from Brown in that she’s one of the tinier puppies and she is just a cutie pie. Red is a little bit like Brown Collar in that she really, really relates to people too. She just loves to be picked up and she loves to be held, moving our pillow there. She has these very pretty little white marks on her feet, and then her really pretty little white chest. She’s just a sweetheart. She has very strong eye contact and she is in one of the types of puppies who bonds really well with people. That’s Red Collar Girl.

Here is Miss Pink Collar Girl. Miss Pink Collar Girl is one of the more outgoing puppies in the litter. She is full of fun and excitement and she just likes to be in the middle of everything. It doesn’t matter if it’s other puppies or if it’s people or if it’s playing with toys. She just wants to be in the center of it all and fully engaged. You can see she has that beautiful little beauty spot there as part of her party markings and she has a little black dot on her nose too. She’s a really cute little puppy and she’s also very affectionate. That’s Miss Pink Collar.

That winds up all of the puppies. We’ve now seen everybody. Now Taylor can get a bit of a break from running back and forth with them all. It’s a lot to manage with 11 of them. I can really appreciate how much it’s been for Breezy to go through and deal with for these past few weeks. I think she’s going to be really happy to go back home with her family again. Breezy herself is doing very well. She hasn’t lost too much weight. Her coat’s looking really good. We had both she and Hazel groomed yesterday, and they came back with nice new fresh dresses and really looking just spectacular. She still has a really good appetite. She’s still in a really good mood and being a mom to all these kids doesn’t seem to faze her at all.

Now we were talking about what the puppies have been eating and how we’ve moved them over to eating a combination of the raw food, pumpkin and goat’s milk. Now, we talk about nutrition with every litter and we’ve gone through it fairly extensively. What I’d suggest you do is go to the YouTube channel for Van Isle Doodles and check back and look at the Blonde Brownies playlist. Then if you go to Episode Six, I believe it is in the Blonde Brownies litter, you’ll find there that we do quite an extensive bit of information on raw food.

We talked about CRUDO, which is the raw food that your puppy has been weaned to, and that is the food that your puppy will be eating when your puppy comes home with you, and we will give you links here below this video where you can buy CRUDO and also, you can just pick it up from us when you pick up your puppy. You can tell us how much you’d like if you’d want a week’s or a month’s supply of it and you can take that home with you.

Now, most of the puppies we find tend to enjoy the CRUDO until they’re about three or four months old, and then they start to want something a little different. As I’ve said many times, variety is really important so you want to try to integrate different brands of food around the four month age. Now some of the dogs really like to stick with the CRUDO for the rest of their lives and others are I don’t need that anymore.

The reason for that is the texture. We feed them and wean them to CRUDO because it’s a nice, very smooth, fine texture almost like a liver pate. It’s much easier for them to digest. It’s much easier for them to manage when they don’t have all of their teeth and there aren’t larger chunks as there are in most adult raw dog food packages.

We feed our adults Buddies, and that is a coarser grind and it has the full organs in there and the dogs need to have their teeth and they need to have a fair bit of power in their jaws by then to deal with that but we also feed our dogs CRUDO in order to give them the variety. We’ll give you a link as well for Buddies. If you live on Vancouver Island, it’s quite easy to find. You can get it in Nanaimo, Duncan and Victoria. In the Courtenay area as well, you are able to purchase Buddies raw food. It’s a great product and it’s made locally here on Vancouver Island.

If you live on the lower mainland, so if you’re in Vancouver, North Van, West Van, Burnaby or any of those available in in quite a few locations, and you can buy it directly from CRUDO in Burnaby.Wwe will give you all the links to their retail locations below the video, so it’s easy for you to find.

Some of your puppies will want to stay on CRUDO, some of your puppies will be looking to change to something different. Now we recommend by six months that you’re feeding your puppy quite a few different brands of raw food and giving them a really good variety. Variety is the spice of life and when you’re a dog, it’s really important that you change up the brands and the proteins quite regularly. We feed our adult dogs CRUDO as well as Buddies. Buddies is the bulk of what they eat. It has more organ meat in it and it’s a much coarser grind, so your dog needs to have all their teeth in and a good amount of power in their jaw to be able to work with a food that’s that type of a grind.

Buddies is readily available on Vancouver Island, and it is a product that’s made on Vancouver Island so you can get that in Duncan, Victoria Nanaimo and in Courtenay, and again, we’ll give you a link to all the retail locations for where you can purchase Buddies. On the lower mainland, there is a great store called True Carnivore. It’s located in the Kerrisdale area. However, they deliver and they’ll deliver for quite a distance, so I know they deliver to Delta, Burnaby, the North Shore. If you’re out farther in Chilliwack or Abbotsford or perhaps Coquitlam, you may need to go and pick it up yourself but their delivery service is excellent. They also have a really good staff and they’re very knowledgeable, so they’ll be able to help you out.

Now, if you’re living in a different province such as Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, you won’t be able to find the CRUDO or the Buddies. Not a problem, there are still lots of different types of raw dog food available to you and we can help you with that. The one we’re going to suggest that you start off with is Red Dog Blue Cat. Red Dog Blue Cat is also a really nice fine grind that’s similar to the CRUDO. The dogs really like it. They have an excellent selection of different types of proteins. It’s a very high quality food. It’s a little bit pricey to keep as the main bit of your raw food diet for your dog but it’s great for starting off when you first go home.

That’s all we’re going to talk about for raw food today. What I’d like you all to do is to go back and review our videos that we made from the Blonde Brownies litter, it’s Episode Six, and we gave you a good bit of information on raw food there and why raw food is better for your dog than feeding them kibble. Also the Cafe Noir litter in Episode Five, you will find even more information on raw food feeding, bones and treats. The treats that we recommend and the chews we recommend and chews are really important because your puppy is going to be wanting to put everything in their mouth, they’re going to be teething and you don’t want them chewing on you or your furniture or their nice beds. You want them to be chewing on a chew toy or chew stick.

The only ones that we recommend are Puppy Love. Puppy Love is made in Alberta. We know for a fact that it is all sourced in Canada. It’s 100% natural, it’s safe, it’s good for your pet. We happen to know the people who own Puppy Love. Reynold’s been to the plant and we’re very familiar with them. We’re really happy that they allowed us to partner with them and offer their products for sale. We can supply you with those. We will give you a list of everything that’s available and the pricing. You can give us your order, and that we’ll have ready when you come to pick up your puppy. Then after you have your puppy home, we’re happy to keep supplying you and we just ship the orders out.

We regularly send things out to all of our puppy families with various Puppy Love items, and we have both puppy and adult treats and chews available for the dogs. The other video I’d like you to watch is the Razzle Dazzle Episode Five litter. Again, we talk about food, we talk about treats, and we talk about dry dog food a bit as well, grain free and things like that. If you watch those three videos, you will know just as much as I do, I’m sure about feeding your puppy properly. It’s a complex subject and it’s an ever changing subject and it’s something that we find really interesting.

I’m a certified canine nutritionist and I find all of the education and things I’m learning about it just fascinating and news does come out in new studies really regularly so it is an ever evolving subject. We try to keep up with that and try to stay on top of it and share everything that we learn with you.

The other items that we have available for you are from Adored Beast. The main thing we recommend for all of our families from Adore Beast is a product called Love Bugs. That’s a cute name. Adored Beast is also Canadian made in Nova Scotia. They are an environmentally ethical and sustainable company, so everything is handcrafted and made with tremendous care. Love Bugs are a canine specie specific pre and probiotic and we find that they just help the dogs digestive system so well. They really keep your dog running smoothly. That and the pumpkin and you generally aren’t going to experience any problems digestively speaking, so we also can offer you those.

The final thing that we recommend to everyone is marine phytoplankton. That’s available in many different locations. Adored Beast has it so we can provide you with that or you can buy it from Amazon or even London Drugs. Marine phytoplankton is good for people too. Reynold and I take it and it’s an excellent source of omegas, and it is, as I said, environmentally friendly and sustainable. The Adored Beast product is made on land with filtered Atlantic ocean water, so all of the heavy metals have been filtered out. The product is grown on the land, so we’re not taking any food source away from any marine life. It’s a really good product. It’s a little bit more expensive than the one that’s available on Amazon because it is environmentally ethical. For some people, that’s important and for other people, it’s not, so I leave that up to you entirely as to which you will prefer.

The other thing that I want to talk to you about which is somewhat related to food is travel sickness. One of the things that happens with puppies is they do get carsick. You can imagine the first time they go in a car and they’re swinging around and would you know, they’re usually in a crate, because they’re with us the first few times they’re in a car. It’s a little bit not only motion sickness that’s involved, but it’s also stressful. It’s the first time the puppies leave home. It’s the first time they’re in a car. They’re segregated into crates, and so the whole experience is a little bit of what is going on. We take them out in the car a few times. We take them to the vet, et cetera, and this helps them to become accustomed to the car.

However, regardless of how many times they go with us, when they go home on their own with you, that is an entirely different situation, because not only are they leaving home and on their own, they’re also with people that they’ve never smelled and never seen before. It’s a bit of an overwhelming experience, and a very common response for dogs when they’re overwhelmed is to either have a little bit of a runny poop or to throw up. We always recommend when you’re picking up your puppy, that you come with a couple of towels or blankets, a pee pad and a good supply of paper towels because you can be sure most likely, your puppy is going to throw up at least a bit on the way home.

Now, most puppies by the next day are totally over that, and that’s it. That’s the one and only time that they are carsick. Generally, we find the first time we take them out in the car and take them to the vet, they might be sick, and then that’s it. The next time when we go back out in the car, they’re usually fine. Sometimes no, sometimes they’re still sick again. Some of them it takes a little longer to adjust to driving and riding in the car, and most of us love to have our puppies come with us in the car.

I love having Ripple and Spirit come with me in the car. They really like going in the car, and Ripple in particular, she and I are very bonded. She is my dog. She’s my special dog. I like to take her with me everywhere. She’s never had a problem getting carsick but the first two times she did go in the car as a baby, she was sick.

What happens if you take your puppy home and a week later, they’re still throwing up each time they go in the car or really having a lot of heavy drool. Then what do you do? What you want to do is desensitize your dog to the car. You’ve heard me talking in my other videos about desensitizing your puppy and how we do that here at Van Isle Labradoodles. We have your puppies exposed to thunder and fireworks and traffic sounds.

We make a lot of noise in the doodle den. We honk the horn outside so they can hear us. We come in and we go, make all sorts of funny faces. Reynold wears a hat sometimes. We wear different clothing, and we have all sorts of different people, young, old men, women all come in so the puppies are exposed to these things over and over and learn that there’s nothing to be worried about. This is all fine. These are all still people who are super nice to us. They’re all good to us. I’m not worried. Same thing with the car.

What you want to do is start off with just taking your puppy and putting them in the car. Don’t even turn it on. Take them in and you’re all happy and you’re like, “Come on Rover. Let’s go in the car. Oh wow. This is so much fun.” Really be upbeat and pet them and cuddle them and have a really high value treat and give them that high value treat. Only do it in the car for five minutes, just enough to be all it happy, big smiles and a nice open face. Give them the tree, tell them what a wonderful dog they are, back in the house.

Try doing that three, four times a day. Then the next day, same thing. 10 minutes, turn the car on, turn the car off. Next day, same thing, 15 minutes, this time back the car in and out of the driveway each time. Now if at any time the dog is sick, stop, go back to the step before until your dog is able to move on to the next step. Once you’ve got the backing in and out of the driveway done, then go out of the driveway, drive a block or two or four. Try to keep it as straight as possible and fairly even speed. This time you might want to have somebody with you so you can say “Yay, great job. Way to go.”

Now while you’re doing this, I don’t suggest that you have your dog in a crate or in a harness or in a car seat or anything. Just have the dog in the car. Some dogs are better if they can look out the window and see where they’re going. Some dogs are better if they can’t see. Some dogs are better if you have an SUV in the very back. Some dogs are better close where they can see and hear you. You’ll have to do a little bit of practice with your dog and find out where they’re most comfortable.

Taylor takes all the puppies out for us and she has one of the booster seats that you’ve seen on the private Van Isle Doodles Facebook owners page. Those things are terrific. For whatever reason, the puppies all seem to love sitting in the booster seat and it’s a really good experience for them because they’re raised and they can see. I prefer it if the dogs are comfortable looking where they’re going, because that is what is going to be the most natural situation for them in a car. If you have a booster seat, great and that does involve a harness and being attached, so you don’t want to use the booster seat until you’re able to go the four blocks without any trouble, then you can put them in the booster seat and start moving along from there.

Now if you have a dog who is subject to car sickness, what you want to do the first few times in the booster seat is have a really good blanket surrounding the booster seat so you don’t have to worry about trying to clean it. Much easier to clean the blanket or the towel or whatever you have. If you have the type of arrangement where your dog is in the backseat, same thing, have everything all nicely covered, until you’re quite sure that everything is going well.

Once you get to where your dog is comfortable and can ride in the car, make sure you take them out every day for at least a week 10 days in a row. Then try to make sure you take them out at least every three days so it stays ingrained in their mind that this is fun, and take them somewhere fun. Don’t have a dog that’s getting carsick and the only place they ever go to is the vet or to the groomer. That’s never going to give them a good association with the car.

What you want to do is take them to the park, take them to the beach, take them for a walk, take them to a friend’s house, somewhere that they really enjoy going and make sure you keep up with the yeah, come on. Let’s go for a ride. It’s great. Having your dog come with you in the car is something that’s really enjoyable.

I hope you find this helpful. Be sure to check out the other videos as I mentioned, from Blonde Brownies, Cafe Noir and Fazzle dazzle for your full information on raw feeding and Puppy Love treats and the Adored Beast products that we offer as well and whatever you do when you’re feeding your dog, don’t ever forget to give them the pumpkin. If anything is going to give your dog an upset stomach it, tends to be because somebody has forgotten to give them their pumpkin. The pumpkin is as important as the Love Bugs is for keeping everything running smoothly.

I hope the travel trips or the car sickness trips were helpful for you. It will help you form a nice strong relationship with your puppy and both of you will enjoy traveling together wherever you go. If you liked this video, please take a moment to give us a thumbs up and we hope you subscribe to our channel, and take the time to watch all of our videos to learn all sorts of things about Australia and Labradoodles and thanks so much for watching.