Below are pictures of our current litter of Tara’s 5 week old puppies.
Tara’s 5 Week Old Puppies: The Girls
Miss Green
Miss Teal
Ms. Yellow
Miss Purple
Miss Pink
Tara’s 5 Week Old Puppies: The Boys
Mr. Blue
Mr. Brown
Mister Gray
Mr. Red
Tara’s 5 Week Old Puppies: Developmental Information
Five week old puppies are developing extremely fast socially. This is the age that we encourage people outside of our family and our team of workers to visit. It is important that puppies are exposed to a variety of different types of people as well as a wide variety of sights, sounds, and experiences.
Socialization With Many People
Visits with people come fairly naturally. We have a good amount of visitors on a regular basis. However, we have to be more intentional with environmental exposure. At five weeks, we start stretching our puppies by having them experience many new and moderately stressful situations. We push and encourage them, but we are careful not to overly stress them. Each puppy’s individual temperament is taken into consideration as we tweak our socialization program to best suit each puppy.
Environmental Desensitization
We have a check-off list that is day specific for desensitizing our puppies to common environmental stressors. Puppies are not born with a confident ability to face the world. Most puppies are hesitant to even come out of their pen at first. Our check-off list covers the entire time puppies are here, but the list grows exponentially starting at about 4 1/2 weeks of age.
The biggest accomplishment for our five-week old puppies is training to the doggy door, closely followed by step navigation training. Between 4 weeks 5 days and 5 weeks 2 days, we have intensive training in these two areas.
Doggy Door Training
Pushing through a doggy door takes not only skill but it takes courage, confidence, and analytical thinking.
Tight places are often scary to puppies. Many puppies are afraid of the door. Squeezing through the tight opening is scary. So is the flap as other puppies cause it to pop in their faces. Puppies learn to overcome their fears. It builds confidence.
Intelligence is required to figure out the door. Just the act of finding the doggy door requires thinking skills. Puppies will often push and scratch at every area of our door except for the place where the doggy door is before eventually finding it. Puppies learn to think instead of merely sit and cry.
All meals during these days are strategically placed to encourage puppies to go in and out the door. Our mama dogs are trained to help in the process as well. They go in and out the door encouraging the puppies to follow.
Training on Steps
The steps are also scary. There are only two steps, but to a five-week old puppy, they are a challenge. They have to strain to get up the steps one at a time. Then they have to muster up the courage to ease themselves back down. The steps build a lot of confidence.
For more information on how we raise our puppies, see our Raising Puppies page.
We’ll continue keeping you posted on how Tara’s five week old puppies are growing on a weekly basis. See our Available Puppies page to get to pages of Tara’s 5 week old puppies at other ages.
