biomechanics, common sense, and a death

Feeding puppies is an art.  It seems simple- even a dog can do it, right?


Not so quick there.  That dog is designed for this, the puppies are designed to match her, and they are all primed with mamma hormones to seek and enjoy the process.  Me, I have a tall naked human body and am all the wrong shape and texture.  Spending an hour hunched over puppies can really give you a crick in the neck!  So I keep reminding myself- use correct posture.  Keep the shoulders back, relax unnecessary tension, keep breathing, don't hunch forward, don't twist your wrist or hold tight with your hand.  Correct use of human biomechanics is incredibly important!

And common sense...something else the mamma dog has in spades but I seem to be weak on.  Guess what I learned last night?  if you hold their head UP instead of down, less milk dribbles out of the puppy's mouth.  Well, duh, you say.  I am not generally considered slow on the uptake, and yet it took me nearly a week to figure this out!  I have to practice looking at what is in front of me more.

The sad news is that we lost one of our big males to aspiration pneumonia.  This is one of the major dangers to puppies who are bottle fed.  Aspiration in medical terminology is the entry of foreign materials into the lungs.  In this case our greedy little boy- one of the largest in the litter- got too enthusiastic with his drinking and breathed in some milk.  He wasn't able to cough all of it out and by the next feeding he was too sick to eat.  I always say that one of the best things you can learn from animals is what the entire life process from birth to death looks like.  I just wish the time between hadn't been so short.