Rags in Whelping Boxes are Puppy Killers

By Ed Frawley  |  Last modified: November 2, 2003

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So you are going to whelp a litter and you have your whelping box and stack of old rags all ready to go. The litter comes as planned and everything looks good. You feel a little sorry for the pups and decide to use some of your old rags for the pups to sleep on. After all, its a lot more comfortable to sleep on an old towel than the hard ground of the whelping box.

The next morning, you come into the room to find a dead pup that is either under the towel or blanket or tangled in the old rag. This all could have been prevented if you had wiped your whelping box out with the rags before going to bed and then ripped up old newspaper and left the pups with the paper rather than the blanket or rags.

Take it from someone who has learned the hard way: rags are for cleaning, blankets are for your bed, and newspaper or wood chips are for whelping boxes or whelping rooms.

I look at old rags as puppy death traps. They crawl in them when they scoot around the whelping box, get tangled like you see below, and then either die. A pup can get weak and die overnight if it does not eat or if it gets pushed off to the side and gets cold.

This is a 2-day old pup that got lucky. Maybe that's what I will name it. I forgot to train my employee to take all rags out of the whelping box. This pup got tangled and was on its way to dying when I found it at 7AM. It had been tangled up all night and was laying under the side rail of the whelping box. It was too weak to suck and the only thing that saved it was several bottle feedings with my homemade puppy formula.

When you have weak pups, I have found that a human bottle like the one above with a lot of pin holes in the nipple allows the pups to suck and get nourishment. Sometimes pups are too weak to suck milk from their mother, but they can suck and get milk from this bottle because it takes less energy. The formula I use has 11 calories per cc.

I also like the bottle rather than tube feeding for beginners. It's easy to put too much formula in a sick pup. If they puke and then inhale, they get formula in their lungs. That spells a dead pup. So when in doubt, bottle feed your babies. It takes a little longer but it's the safest way to do it.

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About Author

Ed Frawley

Ed Frawley is the founder and owner of Leerburg.com and has been producing professional dog training videos since 1982. Over the years, he has collaborated with some of the most respected dog trainers in the country. His body of work includes 194 full-length training DVDs and 95 comprehensive online courses. In addition to these, he has produced and published over 4,000 short training videos available free of charge on Leerburg.com and across the company's social media platforms.

Ed and his wife, Cindy—also a professional dog trainer—bred working-line German Shepherds and Belgian Malinois for more than 35 years. Although they retired from breeding in 2009, they had produced over 300 litters by that time.

Ed also served as a K9 handler for the local sheriff's department for 10 years, working in partnership with the West Central Drug Task Force. During his time in law enforcement, he handled multiple narcotics and patrol dogs and conducted more than 1,000 K9 searches. If you want to learn more about Ed, read about his history here.

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