From the moment you became the owner of a she-dog, you take in hand not only welfare of this pet, but also the health of its future broods. It is a great responsibility, so you should be ready for this. This article will give you some useful information.
So, preparing your dog for the pregnancy you should start long before the coupling. From the moment, when your pet is on heat for the first time, you should give it balanced food, in which there should be enough minerals, microelements, vitamins and nutrients, or during pregnancy puppies will develop slowly and risk to be born weak and frail.
However, don’t overfeed your dog, excess weight and obesity can turn out with big problems and even become the reason of spontaneous abortion. Consult a veterinary surgeon, he will give you all the recommendations about feeding and will help you to make a correct diet according to the age, breed of the dog and its physiological features.
In the first month of pregnancy don’t try to change usual diet and dietary habits of your pet, those nutrients which future mummy gives to future puppies are quite enough. But from fourth week when puppies in the womb start to grow and develop intensively, increase volume of portions by 10-15 % per week, daily norm must increase by 50 % against primary for the time of pupping. During this time your dog must begin to eat three times a day, and from the fifth week the number of feedings should be 4-5 times a day.
During pregnancy your pet needs a large number of proteins, calcium, vitamins and microelements for giving all the necessary for puppies and protecting itself form exhaustion. Be in no hurry to feed a dog with food additives and vitamins before you consult a veterinary surgeon, this process needs a super accurate dosage, and any abnormality threatens to serious problems with health. An optimum variant is using some ready diets, for example, Pedigree®, which is balanced with mathematical accuracy and ideally corresponds to requirements of your dog.
Maintain diet and volume of feeding of a dog during lactation period after delivery, after all newborn puppies get everything from mother’s milk. When your puppies are be 3-4 weeks old, start training them to “adult” food. Leading veterinary surgeons and dog breeders recommend using for these a special dry diet «First additional food», which you can give to puppies before every maternal feeding.
Keep an eye on weight of newborn puppies, to prevent their overfeeding. Small, not fully developed stomachs are not ready to cope with such a large quantity of food, that’s why, follow a principle «it is better to eat less, but more often», convert daily norm into small portions.
Pets are not just “alive” beings that live with us, pet are a lot more important. And you are really responsible for them. Those of you who have dogs, must know info about dog health. This is not a bizarre statement, this is what your pet really needs from you.
And a real dog lover should remember today the Internet technologies give you a truly unique chance to choose exactly what you need for the best price on the market. Strange, but most of the people don’t use this chance. In real practice it means that you should use all the tools of today to get the info about dog health.
Search Google and other search engines. Visit social networks and have a look on the accounts that are relevant to your topic. Go to the niche forums and join the online discussion. All this will help you to build up a true vision of this market. Thus, giving you a real opportunity to make a smart and nicely balanced decision.
And also sign up to the RSS feed on this blog, because we will everything possible to keep this blog tuned up to the day with new publications about “old dog health” issues and other important topics about dogs.
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