Bottle-feeding puppies, and assumptions thereof

My last post caused quite a stir. I got Facebook comments and private messages, emails, and texts, all telling me, more or less kindly, that bottle-feeding puppies is a bad idea.

This is what I said that caused the ruckus: “Tooey was about out of milk after almost exactly 12 hours of whelping, so I ran to the store for goats milk and baby bottles. We fed the pups who were still hungry…”

Every message, comment, email, and text made the same assumption: that I was choosing to bottle-feeding the pups instead of (or in addition to) allowing Tooey to feed them herself. True, this is one possible interpretation that could be made from what I said.

But it’s not the only possible interpretation.

Interestingly, before offering their opinion, none of the people who contacted me asked me what the circumstances were or why I did what I did.

It’s true that I’ve never whelped puppies before, and experience is a great teacher. Reading and research are no substitute. Even so, I have enough years in writing professionally about healthcare to understand the many advantages of breast-feeding human babies, to know what colostrum is and what it does, and how breast-feeding stimulates the mother to produce more milk. It’s not a stretch to make the correlation with dams and puppies. Added to that, all who contacted me are themselves experienced, knowledgeable breeders. I have no doubt that bottle-feeding puppies is not the best idea.

But…

There are probably among those who contacted me, breeders who would be willing to see those last puppies not get fed because their mother wasn’t producing anything from her nipples. But those people weren’t there. I was, and I’m not.

Fortunately, the situation was very temporary. Tooey was enticed to drink more water and get something to eat. Within just an hour or so of the last puppy’s birth, I could express liquid from Tooey’s nipples again, and all puppies have since been able to get as much as they want.

I doubt that these puppies will have any further need for baby bottles, and Tooey enjoys the goat’s milk.

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