Breeders Special - Raising puppies with Naturavetal® - Naturally good from the start

As a health-conscious breeder, you know what a big difference the right nutrition can make to the puppies and their new families. Even if the puppies only stay with you for a relatively short time, during this time you lay the foundations that are crucial for the future development of the puppies.

During the first few weeks of life, puppies begin to socialise with each other. However, the focus is not only on psychological development, but the healthy physical development is also decisively influenced during this time. In this sensitive phase of the puppies' development, the breeder through a balanced, species-appropriate diet, can ensure the healthy development of the puppies’ organs, the right formation of muscles and joints, appropriate bone growth and a harmonious interplay of hormones. The most valuable thing you can give puppies on their journey through life is natural, species-appropriate nutrition for their holistic well-being.

All beginnings are difficult - and for some puppies even more so. If they lose their mother, e.g. due to complications at birth, the mother is severely weakened, has too little milk or the puppies have been abandoned, then they have already been through a lot of stress already, at the beginning of their lives. They then need a loving person to look after them, nurture them and provide them with a special and ideally natural diet so that they can thrive healthily and magnificently. And even if the little ones have had more luck and the mother is by their side, at some point they will still have to be weaned and slowly introduced to ‘real food’.

In this guide, you can read more about how you can gradually acclimatise puppies to solid food.

Puppy rearing with natural and species-appropriate nutrition

Our concept for puppy rearing is based on feeding the cold pressed Canis Plus® Puppy and Young Dog foods in Poultry (also available in small pellet form) or Salmon, the grain-free Canis Plus® Puppy meals, Canis Plus® Pasture fed lamb or Beef Power rolls with millet and full cream goat's milk, Canis Plus® Pure Meat Pots or Meat Rolls or BARF in combination with Canis Extra Whole Goat's Milk Powder. Each individual component is proven a worthy nutritious food and can only be even better if more is added.

If you need to supplement the milk to raise puppies, our Canis Extra Full Cream Goat's Milk Powder is ideal, which you can mix with warm water and stir into a goat's milk. When the puppies are a little older, switch to a mixture of our goat's milk powder, mixed with Canis Plus® Puppy Meals or, for a change, Canis Plus® Pasture Fed Lamb or Beef Power rolls, and mix the whole thing with a little lukewarm water to make a mash. After a few days, you can crumble the pellets of our cold-pressed Canis Plus® Puppy & Young Dog Food into a blender, for example, and add them to the mash. In this way, you can gradually bring together new and nutritious food components and later simply reduce the Canis Extra whole goat's milk powder bit by bit and finally omit it completely.

A simple concept that gives you the opportunity to create completely individualised meals that are tailored to the needs of the little ones – being species-appropriate and natural.

Depending on the situation in which the puppies find themselves, we would like to introduce to you our concept, which should help you to make the start in life as easy as possible for your little ones.

Up to 3-4 weeks of age - lukewarm water with Canis Extra Full Cream Goat's Milk Powder

If the mother provides enough milk, you do not need to supplement milk at the beginning.

If you want to support the mother, for example because she has a large litter, you can use our Canis Extra Full Cream Goat's Milk Powder. At the beginning, the puppies are fed at regular, short intervals. The intervals can vary. If you consider that the mother initially nurses her puppies up to 3 times an hour, it becomes clear that you have to follow the puppies. You can then gradually increase the intervals. On average, puppies are fed every 2 hours in the first few weeks of life. The amount that needs to be fed can also vary greatly, depending on the breed as well as the puppy's stage of development. This is because individual needs can also vary greatly within a litter.

3rd/4th – 6th week of life - slowly getting used to solid food

On average, you can start mixing Canis Plus® Puppy Meals and Canis Extra Whole Goat's Milk Powder from the 3rd week of life and, for variety also replace the Puppy Meals with Canis Plus® Pasture Fed Lamb with Millet and Goat's Milk or Canis Plus® Beef Power with Millet and Goat's milk. The full cream goat's milk powder is mixed with water and then mixed with the wet food to form a paste that is similar in consistency to yoghurt or quark.

Depending on how much milk the puppies still get from their mother, diarrhoea can occur if there is an oversupply of fat. In this case, water can be used for the mash instead of whole goat's milk. After a short time, usually from the 5th week, you can then grind Canis Plus® puppy and young dog food in a blender or mortar and mix it with lukewarm water or whole goat's milk.

The puppies are fed on average every 4 hours. The period can be extended as they get older. The mixing ratio of whole goat's milk porridge to the other components can also be changed as the puppy gets older.

If possible, make sure to separate a wet food meal from a dry food meal so that the puppy is trained to eat each type of food separately. This way they will then enjoy eating them individually. This makes it easier to switch to dry or wet food later on.

6th week of life - offer dry food individually

Canis Plus® Puppies & Young Dogs cold pressed food should be offered to every single puppy by the end of the 6th week of life. Feed this by hand in small quantities so they get used to the tastes and textures and it becomes imprinted before they go to the new owner. If you need to feed your puppy more quickly, we also have something suitable -our tins of Canis Plus® puppy meals offer your puppies everything they need for stable growth in the form of high-quality complete food. For more variety, you can also feed your puppy our Canis Plus® Pasture Fed Lamb with Millet and Whole Goat's Milk or Canis Plus® Beef Power with Millet and Whole Goat's Milk to get them used to solid food in small steps.

From the 8th week of life - switching to solid food

From the 8th week of life, you can switch the puppy to dry food completely, wet food or BARF.

You can feed Canis Plus® Puppies & Young Dogs, Canis Plus® Puppy Meals, Canis Plus® Pasture Fed Lamb with Millet and Whole Goat's Milk, Canis Plus® Beef Power with Millet and Whole Goat's Milk and additional vegetable supplement, BARF (preferably minced) or Canis Plus® Pure Meat Pots or Meat Rolls together with vegetables/fruit or our air-dried Canis Extra Top-Fit-Mix or Canis Extra Vit/Min-Variety Flakes as well as a vegetable fat source such as our Canis Extra Organic Coconut Oil and a calcium source such as our Canis Extra Organic Eggshell Powder or our Canis Extra Algae Lime.

Which snacks are suitable for puppies?

The question of which chews are particularly suitable for puppies is easy to answer: You shouldn't feed them at all in the first few weeks of life. The puppy has so much to get to know and there are so many different flavours to experience that we recommend not introducing harder chews to puppies until they are 12 weeks old.

It is best to use food as a treat so as not to spoil the puppy too much.

You can find out all about suitable snacks and chews for young dogs in our guide ‘Healthy puppy food: species-appropriate from the start’. Feel free to take a look.

What about parasite prophylaxis/prevention for young puppies?

If you as a breeder decide in favour of natural parasite prophylaxis, it can be difficult as a member of a breeding association. Many associations have clear requirements for the breeder with regard to parasite prophylaxis. The breeder must fulfil these requirements in order to obtain approval for their litter. For example, the mother dog should often be wormed during pregnancy and the puppies should be wormed every two weeks from the second week of life - regardless of whether there is a worm infestation or not. Vaccinations also begins for the young puppies as part of the basic immunisation phase. There are many influences that can affect the delicate canine organism and impair the development of its immune system.

Tick and flea prophylaxis/prevention in young puppies

For both the puppies and the mother, the gentler the treatment the better. The mother nurses and warms her puppies. If the mother is given a chemical preparation that spreads through her blood, the puppies could absorb some of it through their mother's milk. If, on the other hand, she is given a chemical spot-on, it cannot be ruled out that the puppies will come into contact with it through physical contact with the mother. The immune system of young dogs is still developing and many are also in the middle of their basic immunisation phase - any external and potentially harmful influence should be avoided as long as there is no need for it. Canis Extra Organic Coconut Oil is the gentlest way to protect very young dogs and their mothers from parasites. For example, ticks avoid dogs that smell of coconut oil. This seems to be due to the lauric acid it contains. Both massaged into the coat externally and mixed with food internally, coconut oil can promote defence against ticks.

Worm prophylaxis/prevention in young puppies

As soon as the puppies start to spend time outside, you should submit regular faecal samples and have faecal tests carried out for parasites. Feeding Canis Extra organic coconut oil and freshly grated carrots has proven to be a good way of promoting an intestinal environment in which parasites are reluctant to colonise. The following example shows what this feeding-related support can look like. However, the quantities may need to be adjusted individually. If you have any questions, please contact our team of experts.