Before you buy a Christmas puppy
Before you buy a Christmas puppy
Shopping pet tips to keep in mind for the holidays and beyond
As much as I love hanging out with family and friends during the holidays, I must admit that quite a few of my favorite Christmas memories involve a dog somewhere nearby. While my mother will give me a guilt trip about it, my father already knows that if there is a dog anywhere near me, you just invited a dog napper into your home. In the very rare occasion that a dog doesn’t like me (less than a handful of times in owning two dogs and walking 80) and I have to opt out of a dog walk, my eyes will very likely stay on that four-legged fur ball running around the room.
Recommended Read: “Before you buy a Christmas puppy ~ Shopping pet tips to keep in mind for the holidays and beyond”
But there was one particular puppy who I wish I would’ve laid eyes on a few weeks after Christmas. The puppy was beautiful and comfortably sat in my lap, but I kept hearing him whimper. Even after being bottle fed, he seemed sad in a way that I just did not remember my other two dogs being. Although I was initially terrified of the puppy that became a statue on our basement step for 13 years and ecstatic to see another one who hogged our hallway for 9 years, neither one of them seemed miserable to be around me upon first introduction. No matter what I did with this one, nothing helped.
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The next time I saw my brother’s wife, who the dog belonged to, she was dog-less. She said she had to return the dog to his mother for a little while longer because the dog was starving. As soon as he saw his mother, he immediately went straight for the colostrum. According to the American Kennel Club, “Puppies rely on their mother’s antibodies to get them through their first few weeks of life. Puppies start to lose this immunity between six and eight weeks of age, at around the time they receive their first vaccines.”
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But the owner of the girl dog just wanted to be able to provide safe, happy homes for these puppies, not knowing that she was doing a disservice to them at such a young age. This was the first in many lessons I learned about puppy shopping over Christmas.