The Week 4 Photo Call!

Iggle Piggle - not yet spoken for (??? Dogs for the Disabled ???) An active, inquisitive puppy that likes lots of stimulation.

Golden Ingot - Hayley, Mollie and Mark's Puppy

Isla Skye - the puppy we're keeping

Ikofo Ice Cream - not yet spoken for - again, a candidate perhaps for Dogs for the Disabled. Ikofo is a bold puppy with lots of go!

Lady Isobel - not yet spoken for, sweet natured and very into her cuddles...

Ivory Ice - not yet spoken for and for the life of me I can't see why, he's SO handsome and very laid back - perhaps its because he's always asleep when people come to view?

Amarelo Indy - Leah and Mat, Carole and Barry's Puppy

Indian Imp - Jayne, James and John's Puppy

Isobel discovers one method of keeping everyone else off "her" food!

Socialisation is very important.



Puppies playing outside today...

Two more puppies have found fabulous new homes this week. Mark and Hayley have earmarked Golden Ingot (Red Middle) whilst Mat and Leah have sucumbed to the charms of Amarelo Indy (Red Neck).

Ikofo (Cream puppy, Green Middle) will, I think, be the dog for Dogs for the Disabled - we'll have to see what Rob thinks when he visits, which leaves Isobel, Iggle Piggle (the smallest pup, but the most adventurous and first to pop his head over the parapet...) and Ivory Ice (Red Shoulder) still available.

I have a blood clinic on Tuesday, so the puppies will get their first vet check whilst the vet is here anyway. Its always a huge relief to hear the vet proclaim them sound and free from defects like heart murmers etc.

Barleors Indian Imp explores novel stimuli in a unique manner...

A few notes to prospective puppy owners:

To own a Barleors puppy you will need to be a very special family. We ask that you fill in a questionnaire to ascertain whether you are suitable. You can download the questionnaire in PDF format or Microsoft Word Format. You will then need to fill it in and email it back to us. We will contact you by your preferred method and talk further.

We make no excuses for the fact that our questionnaire asks some very searching and very personal questions, or that it will require a fair amount of research on your behalf if you have never owned a dog before. We firmly believe that anyone incapable of filling it in, will be incapable of looking after one of our puppies to the very high standards that we have set.

We try to protect our puppies as best we can and would strongly advise you to view our terms and conditions of sale, which can be found by clicking here. (We realise that these are 2008 T's and C's but they're unlikely to change very much in the next couple of weeks!)

For those of you who have already been accepted, please can you sort out a very old tee shirt this week. We would like all of your family to wear the shirt overnight at least, so that it smells strongly of your family. When the puppies are about five weeks old, we'll be attaching the tee shirts to the walls of the puppy pen and by the time you pick your puppy up, your smell will be quite familiar to it. You will take your tee shirt home with you as a "comforter" for your puppy as it will have also become impregnated with the smell of the rest of the litter. So please choose a teeshirt that you'll never want to wear again!

The Barleors Labradoodle Puppies @ 3 Weeks Old

Barleors Puppies - Day 21

The puppies are now three weeks old and ready for viewing. Jayne and her family have already come to see them and they have provisionally decided on Indian Imp, Temperament Test depending of course.

So, we've got 4 boys looking for homes and one girl. I have two very promising prospective owners visiting over the next week and Rob from Dogs for the Disabled will be coming out when they're about five weeks old to choose theirs. So potentially there's only one boy and one girl left now.

Please disregard the date at the bottom of the picture above ... I've only just realised that "date stamp" was on, but that the date in the video camera was wrong! The puppies went outside for a couple of hours this morning. Flossy fed them an alfresco breakfast which I then topped off with a light milk feed (as per Ian Billinghurst's book, "Grow Your Pup With Bones".)

So I can add Grass as a "surface" they've encountered; they've heard lots of garden machinery today too. All the neighbours seemed to be out in their gardens, mowing and strimming. Steve is doing some more home improvements so the puppies have also heard a Tacking Gun (sounds like a pistol) and Sawing today.

There are quite a few choppers flying overhead - probably enroute to the PGA Golf - so I can cross Helicopters off the list of things they've heard and there's been lots of birdsong today too.

This lovely picture depicts a puppies natural desire to be "clean" and not defecate where they sleep (one of the primary reasons for crating puppies overnight). As you can see, they've all attempted to use the "toilet", with varying degrees of success, then they have all retired to the other end of the whelping box to sleep.

The Puppies learning to eat their breakfast....

This is what Ivory Ice thinks of Eastenders! We try to have each puppy out individually during the evening, for a cuddle and a bit of special one-to-one with us.

Early socialisation with other species is vital for an all-round balanced adult dog. We DO NOT condone cat chasing under any circumstances in this household and the puppies are introduced to the cats at about this age. Here we have "Wotsit" my 12 year old tortoiseshell cat meeting Ikofo for the first time. (You can see how impressed he is.)

Thursday was the day that we introduced the puppies to food other than their mothers milk. Although they only had about a tablespoon each, they managed to climb through it, then all over each other, and before long they were all very sticky and in need of a bath! I'm very lucky in that my husband built a wet room for us downstairs, so each puppy can be shampooed and showered off with minimum disruption to their eating and sleeping routine.

Wet puppies of course, would catch a chill very quickly so its important that they are thoroughly dry before you put them back in their whelping box. I use a professional dog dryer on the "warm" setting and have the puppy secure in a soft-bucket. If you start them at this age and get both the water temperature and the dryer temperature just right, they hardly seem to even notice the process.

On Thursday I had Lunch with Gail Ward. Gail runs Cranbourne Dog Training School. It was lovely to catch up on the gossip of the dog-training world again ...and super to have such a willing and experienced "socialiser". This is Gail with Isla.

Here's a quick clip of Flossy feeding her puppies "alfresco" this morning. She gets a small meal after each puppy feed - typically three to 4 chicken wings, a lamb heart, some beef ribs or a couple of breakfast bars. Lots of small meals are easier to digest than a couple of giant ones. The pups are approaching the maximum amount of milk that they will ever take from their mother right now which will peak at the end of this week then start to tail off as what I'm providing actually starts to really count towards their daily calorific ration.

Flossy feeding the puppies today. On the right is their "toilet" ... puppy training pads in a wipe clean plastic holder. This REALLY helps with their house training and if you're buying one of my puppies I'd strongly recommend you get one.



Ivory Ice and Isla investigate this new and novel item in their whelping box.



If you look at Ice's hind foot you can see the puddle...



Confirmed when he left the box a few moments later! (I do have pictures confirming that they are all using their toilet for both functions ... but you don't really need to see them do you? After all, you might be eating...)




Weaning should be an incredibly gradual process. So we started today, introducing a "taste" to each puppy. I start them off with Ian Billinghursts "orphan puppy" recipe. Feel free to email me if you'd like to have it.



This is Isobel enjoying her first "meal".

No doubt they'll all be enjoying their first bath after this lot. Weaning is a very messy process and there's only so much that I'd expect Flossy to have to clean up...

Day 19.

The puppies are now really motoring around in their pen. When Flossy gets in they all scramble over to her on increasingly steadier legs. Of course all this activity requires some recouperation and there are few things sweeter to photograph than contented sleeping puppies...

Their puppy training pads arrived today, so I've set it up and put it in the pen with them. Already they seem to be gravitating towards that end of the whelping box to eliminate.

Ahh, puppy paws. Aren't they soft, shiney and new...?

Barleors Puppies Day 15



Day 12 saw the last day that all the puppies could be put in the same gorilla tub while I change their bedding. They're simply too big now... but it makes a cute picture doesn't it?

Here are today's pics:



This is the puppy we're keeping. So sorry! ...she's not for sale!

At present, Isobel, born number 5, is the most developed puppy. She was the first to open her eyes and the first to walk.

This little boy is one of the paler puppies, a definite cream rather than gold.
Ice was the second puppy to be born.

Red Neck boy was the first puppy to be born. He was also the heaviest puppy at birth.

Red Middle boy was number 7. As you can see, his eyes are only just starting to open today (day 15). Flossy was covered three times in total, so his egg could have been fertilised some 3 days later than some of the other puppies. By 8 weeks these developmental differences will not be noticable at all.

Green Shoulder boy was puppy number 6. His eyes are only just starting to crack open today too.

Green Middle boy is the other paler puppy. He was number 3 to be born and his eyes are almost fully open today.

Green Hip boy was number 4 in line and his eyes are nearly fully open too.

As the puppies are starting to really move about now I've just placed an order for their House Training Pads. These worked incredibly well for the last litter and the puppies were all attempting to use them by the end of their 4th week. You will find the product I've ordered here though I've ordered the Large size as its for the whole litter. This is an excellent site to order the refils from too.

Each Barleors Puppy will come with several training pads as part of their Puppy Pack, but it would be useful if you can stock up in advance.