Showing posts with label working dogs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label working dogs. Show all posts

Monday, September 11, 2017

Olderhill German Shepherds - South Africa


All our pups are born in our house and stay there for the first three weeks. It gets very crowded sometimes! but at least that prevents puppies from getting squashed by their mothers. It's also a good start for the pups to have close contact with us. They are very aware of their surroundings from birth. For example, we often put each of the pups on a teat so that no-one misses out on a meal, and already in their first few days they learn to recognize our smell and come to our hands for food. Between 2 and 3 weeks they start leaving their 'nest' to go to the toilet on newspaper. When they move out of our house they go into thatched-roofed houses with grass and sand runs outside and blankets and newspaper inside. From about 4 weeks we give them toys to play with and have play sessions with them.
When we train them they can do fetching and sit and down and stand on command at 6 weeks, find hidden toys at 7 weeks, and do tracking by 8 weeks. Teaching them is really easy and takes less than 5 minutes a day. (See puppy training.) We deworm our pups from 2 weeks of age and continue every second week until they're 12 weeks. They are vaccinated at 5,  8 and 12 weeks. To protect them from distemper between 9 and 12 weeks, which ordinary vaccines don't, we give them a measles and distemper vaccine.