Your Puppy is Home, Now What?

The Separation from their mother and a change in their diet can be stressful for your puppy. To help keep them healthy and happy, we have a few recommendation.

Education

Prior to bringing your puppy home, we strongly recommend educating yourself on what to expect. The joys of a new puppy are intuitive, but there are challenges as well. Bringing home a new puppy is somewhat similar to bringing home a newborn baby—they are learning so many new things and truly rely on you for their care and training. Please be patient with your puppy as you work to train and teach them. Pay attention to your puppy’s behavior, both good and bad, it is important to steer them way from naughty

puppy behaviors quickly. Individuals tend to allow puppies to do things they wouldn’t want a grown dog to do—this is unwise. Start teaching them right away what is acceptable and what is not.

Keeping Them Healthy

To help your new puppy stay strong and healthy, we recommend. Doc Roy’s GI Synbiotics – Probiotic & Prebiotic–This will help the digestive system and immune system of your puppy. Among other things, stress can upset their GI. We recommend 1-2 mL to be given every other day for the first week the puppy is in it’s new home. Here is a link if you’d like to purchase it online

For a number of reasons, puppies can experience stress, illness, and adverse reactions to a change in food. Should your puppy experience any of these issues and decide to not eat, they would be at risk of have low blood sugar– which can be devastating. Doc Roy’s Forti Cal -High Calorie Nutritional Gel is a concentrated source of rapidly absorbed energy, vitamins, and minerals. Hypoglycemia can be prevented by having a product like this on hand, and monitoring your puppy to make sure it is eating a little bit of food and water every couple of hours. We recommend providing your puppy with access to food and water, even while in it’s crate. Here is the link if you’d like to purchase it online

Avoid People Food

Up to the point of taking them home with you, your puppy has only had milk, puppy food, and water. We discourage puppy owners from giving a puppy people food: they generally aren’t mature enough to process and digest many foods people eat. It’s best to just avoid giving them any of your food. It is a great idea to make yourself aware of people foods that are, or can be, harmful to dogs—Grapes and Raisins can be toxic to puppies, and many people aren’t ware of this.

Schedule A Vet Visit

Within one week of picking up your puppy, he/she will need to be seen by your vet. Each vet is a little different in regard their recommended vaccination schedule, deworming suggestions, and other medications–such as medications for flea/heart worm prevention. Beyond Tails will provide you with a vaccination record, which should take with you to your first vet appointment. Your puppy will leave our care up to date on shots and deworming, per our vet’s recommendations; these will need to continue as instructed by your vet every couple of weeks. If you have questions regarding their upcoming vaccinations feel free to send us an email or check with your vet.

Exercise Caution

Please exercise caution when it comes taking your puppy around other dogs. we strongly recommend keeping them away from areas with lots of other animals, such as dog parks and pet stores, until they are fully vaccinated; Puppies have generally received all of their vaccinations when they are around 4-5 months old. Introducing puppies to some germs before their immune system was prepared for it can be devastating for them. We feel that keeping your puppy home for the first couple months is the best thing for them.

Keeping Them Happy

Dogs are the happiest when we are spending time with them and training them. Here are a few of the products we recommend that will help keep your new puppy happy.