Puppy Survival Thread for New and Old Pups - here comes winter 2024

[Bupster]

I thought I might as well be the one to start the new thread! Nothing to report but a sleepy puppy over here.

Brilliant! Licking is really calming for them apparently. A frozen one is always a winner here. You've just reminded me and I'm going to prep a couple for the freezer tonight as I am usually not organised enough!

Our pup is being very crafty about stealing older dogs dinner!

still have a very sad older dog who gets most upset when subject to a shark attack

They freeze so quickly that I've started doing one in the morning while I'm waiting for my coffee to brew, and then it's done by lunchtime! Such a great idea, keeps her busy for ages and wears her out completely.

Oh @Bruisername that's so hard! No advice, I'm an absolute novice, but sympathy from this end.

Please be careful. One of our adult bitches attacked our male pup, completely unexpectedly, and it was totally out of character for her. She had grown up with our two older dogs and three cats and never shown any aggression. One day, a couple of weeks after we got the pup, she suddenly decided she'd had enough of him. Fortunately we were there and pup was okay, just very frightened.
I'm not trying to scare you - hopefully this won't happen with your pup but please be cautious. We had introduced two puppies to an older dog before with no issues so we were not expecting any trouble.

My older dog is the biggest scaredy cat around! At present we are making sure he has his space and not leaving them alone

trying to train together as well

We honestly thought that about our girl until she grabbed the pup by his neck.

Having said that, our older male was far more gentle and tolerant of the female pup, so it's possibly good that your adult dog is male.

Does anyone have any recommendations for insurance? Current quote is £50pm!!!

I think I've seen people recommend Sainsbury's and Agria so they might be worth a look.

I'm with Petplan, it's £54 monthly but I'm not on the basic plan and mine is a giant breed. We have a vet in the family and it was what she recommended.

We use Agria but it's still about £45 a month. But we went with the lifetime cover 20k a year claims which is the top one, so could have gone cheaper.

I'm with Petplan too @Bruisername and I have my vets' care plan too. I think mine's about £30-40 - I asked friends with dogs and they all said to get the full cover. It's repaid itself already as I had to take him to the emergency vet's one night when he couldn't stop throwing up and that was £500.

Yes we’re with Petplan too, £47 and then £30 for a care plan with our vets. They’re not cheap, these pups! Petplan have always been great with DP’s dogs in the past.

Hello! We got our little cocker spaniel pup last week and she's amazing. I can already tell she's an intelligent breed. We are down to the odd pee indoors if I don't get her out quick enough after a nap, she likes her crate (and me) for napping. Overnight she's got us up every two hours or so which is tiring but I've got two DC who arent the best sleepers so I'm used to it! As expected she's a bitey land shark. We are doing lots of stopping play, redirected, saying no etc. but how long does the bitey stage last? She particularly loves a chomp on me and DS8.

@ConsternationStation
Hi. Oh gosh, you're in that exhausting stage of toilet training and sleep deprivation... It will get easier. Sounds like you're doing okay with toileting already though.
You don't say how old your pup is, but the biting really continues until they get their adult teeth. You just have to channel it as best you can in the meantime by providing lots of permitted (safe) chewing objects and toys.
I'm not the best person to answer this; my pup is a pastoral breed, but there are lots of spaniel people on both threads and I'm sure they can help you. For me, the biting got worse before it got better, but that may not apply with Cockers...

Welcome! Our cocker is 6 months now. We had lots of biting until around 4 months then it subsided slightly but hasn't completely gone yet. He lost all of his baby teeth by around 5.5 months thankfully, and his adult teeth are so blunt in comparison! He doesn't bite us like a small puppy would but he likes to 'play' and nip us at the minute which is annoying. It's like 10% of the level we had as a small puppy though and I'm hoping he will grow out of it! The biting was the worst part so I hope it passes quickly for you...

Till the baby teeth start falling out, @ConsternationStation! But I found if I could think of him as a teething toddler, who was in pain with his gums, I could forgive a lot more (except when he bit me on the ear the same day Trump got shot 😄). Thinking of it that way helps to find the right things to use to redirect, too - if he's chewing on hard things, I replaced with something else hard, etc etc. As well as actual teething things like Nylabones, and rope toys, I found yak chews were useful, frozen carrots, and random household items like plastic and wooden coat hangers. His absolute favourite treasure was and is a clothes peg which I reserved for emergencies 😂

I've read that if they're real land sharks the trick is just to wear long sleeves and get long toys! Mine was a summer puppy so I lived with the scars... Saying no didn't seem to make any difference at all and I read they don't understand what it means, so it's probably not worth getting fussed if they ignore it. Best of luck!

PS mine's half cocker, and as soon as he was over the land shark stage, he moved into full Artful Dodger - here he is last night, stealing my hat the second he got home from daycare, then trying to chew his horrible bone without letting go of it 😄

@Bupster nooooo not the hat and the stinky bone!!! Why would he do this 🤣

My dd goes mad because Vinny loves a hoof and they stink like actual farm, but he likes to press it up against us as he chews it so it makes your clothes stink of cows 🤢🤢🤢

I wore jeans, long sleeves and shoes inside the house at all times. Then there was a point where I stopped needing to wear shoes, and could wear a pair of leggings instead of jeans without me really realising. It was nice when I noticed that!

It's the same as there's a point where you realise 'oh I've not had to clean a wee up from inside the house for a few days.'

It's a good feeling after the slog of dealing with shark teeth etc for so many weeks!

@YorkshireFelix I had to wear long leather riding boots all summer because I had a leg biter. Despite always wearing long sleeves my arms still bear the scars and she's still grabbing my arms and hands even now, at 8 months 😬

Yes, the biting is the hardest thing about rearing pups, for sure.

@ConsternationStation Welcome to the joys of cocker life! They are the very, very best dogs, but the puppy biting is savage. The good news is that adult teeth are much blunter but the bad news is that you may well be, as I was last year, scarred for a while. There isn't much you can do about it except redirect to better things to chew, remove yourself if it gets too much, and believe us when we say that it will end. They do need to learn how to use their mouths though, and biting in play is part of that, regrettably, as my pyjamas are still evidence of.

This summer I distinctly remember thinking how weird it was to feel my dog with my bare legs under the kitchen table, as we got her in the summer last year and I didn't wear a skirt or shorts at all while she was teething, and then it was winter so I was still in leggings. I realised that I'd never felt her fur on my bare skin before. But now I can without fear of being attacked from below and she is a pure joy to be with, 99pc of the time.

@PyreneanAubrie I suppose the trouble you've got is that Brie is so tall that she can reach more parts of you to bite! I met a lovely Heinz 57-type rescue this morning that his owner reckoned was some kind of LGD/GSD cross and he was up to my hip!

Aww, that's good to hear @brushingboots , there is hope that we can all be in nice warm weather clothing next summer instead of bundled up sweltering inside a puppy proof cover-all outfit and heavy boots!

I wonder if that rescue dog you met was a Romanian import... A lot of them seem to have some kind of LGD in their lineage, so some of them do tend to be big. Funnily enough, we measured Brie on Sunday and she's almost 29" at the shoulder, so I guess you'd say she's about hip height too.

She's only just about 9 weeks so I've got a long journey to get out of the land shark stage, I guess. I wasn't expecting her to stop in a week or two or anything. Just wanted to know when the end may be in sight 😂 she's been particularly savage with me today and is chewing EVERYTHING. Me included.

Thank goodness for long sleeves and trousers. I couldn't imagine doing this bitey stage in the summer!

Ouch! You've got your work cut out for the next few weeks. We'll probably all tell you exactly the same stuff, but the biting gets worse when pups are overtired/overstimulated. That's when we all start talking about enforced napping. Tired puppies are without exception, nasty, evil little buggers 😈

Don't despair; by spring you'll be through teething and able to wear short sleeves again.

Betty has ramped up the biting over the last week or so too (she’s 13 weeks) and it’s definitely way worse when she’s tired. Unfortunately she, like her human sister before her, is a serious nap refuser! Very hard to get her to sleep. I think it’s like toddlers – if you miss the window it’s harder for the rest of the day!