I’m going to describe the periods of development as described by Sautter and Glover.

Neonatal Period (0 to 13 days)

A puppy is born with its eyes and ears closed. Taste is a strongly developed sense already, touch a little less so. The puppy isn’t capable of efficient movement but can crawl about slowly by moving its head from side to side. This is how the pup finds its mom. The pup will also whine and yelp for attention. Unable to maintain its own body temperature, the pup relies on snuggling close to mom and its littermates to keep warm. At this age, the puppy is unable to even eliminate waste without the stimulation of its mother’s licking.

Complex learning will not occur during this time period, because the puppy’s brain, motor and sensory capabilities are not highly developed.

Transitional Period (13 to 20 days)

A puppy will open its eyes at approximately day 13. This is when this second development phase begins. Now that its eyes are open, many behavior changes take place in just one week. The puppy will develop motor capacities, allowing the puppy to walk instead of crawl. Now the puppy can explore the world a little more, rather than just seek the warmth and food of its mother. During the period, the pup is able to make clumsy attempts at drinking from a dish. By its third week of life, it will be able to stand and eat from a dish, much like an adult can. The puppy is much less vocal during this time of development. The puppy will even begin wagging its tail when it is interacting with its littermates.

By day 19, the puppy’s ears will have opened, allowing the puppy to startle from loud noises. At day 20, the puppy’s first set of teeth begin to emerge.

Socialization Period (3 to 14 weeks)

At the beginning of this period of socialization, the puppy will be able to move around, but will probably look clumsy. By the end of this period, the puppy’s coordination will have drastically improved to the point where the puppy will be able to run.

When a puppy first starts socializing, it will show following patterns, just like a duck and its chicks. The pup will emotionally attach himself to any object and be willing to follow it. Soon after, the puppy develops its strong avoidance, fear, and withdrawal emotions. Sautter and Glover outline an older scientific study by Freedman, King, and Elliot from 1961 where several sets of puppies of different ages were raised in a field away from humans were brought into a room with human beings. The first set of pups were 3 weeks old. They immediately run up to the human observers with their tails wagging. The other set of puppies were 7 weeks old and they were more hesitant about approaching the human observers. A third set were 14 weeks old. They showed an immediate fear response and never developed a positive approach response. Their conclusion was that during this period of development, if puppies are not exposed to humans, they will become extremely fearful, and are practically wild. On the other hand, puppies who are over-socialized with people during this time period can become over dependent on their owners. It’s not uncommon for these dogs to suffer from separation anxiety even when their owners are absent for short periods of time.

Sautter and Glover describe other studies, which conclude that somehow a lack of human socialization leads to puppies that are less trainable. In one study, by C.J. Pfaffenberger and J.P. Scott in 1959 used German Shepherd dogs in a guide dog raising/training facility. Pups that were kept in the kennel for an extra two weeks (14 weeks as compared to 12 weeks) before being sent to a private home for training, failed the trainability tests five times more frequently than the others.

At the beginning of this development period, the puppies interact more with each other. As their teeth emerge, they will playfully bite and paw at one another. This is when the dominance hierarchy between the littermates begins to develop. When a puppy rolls on its back and extends its paws, it is displaying signs of subordination. This play fighting is important for their adult sexual development.

At the end of the transitional period, and the beginning of this socialization period, a puppy will begin to defecate in certain spots in a consistent manner. Usually the pup will smell the ground, and if it smells that the area has been used before, it will use it again. This is why a new puppy owner is in for many accidents after the first one occurs. You should rush your puppy outside and take him to the same place each time to train him to use this area. To make housetraining easier, use an indoor crate or kennel. Puppies will not urinate or defecate in their own nest, so this will encourage them to hold it until you rush them outside.

A puppy will begin to bark during this phase. At the beginning of this time period they will be vocal when they are in an unfamiliar area, but this will decrease after week 7.
At the beginning of this developmental period, the mother of the puppies will leave the puppy nest. She’ll return to regurgitate for the puppies. This is the beginning of their weaning phase. By the time the puppies are 5 weeks old, she will begin to snap and growl at the puppies when they try to feed from her. Weaning will be complete between weeks 7 and 10.

Juvenile Period (12 weeks through Sexual Maturity)

By sixteen weeks, a puppy should be approximately 60% of its adult size. Maximum physiological development is attained when the dog is two years old. The speed at which a puppy learns things actually slows down at 4 months old, probably because the new learning interferes with its previous learning. This is why you should be consistent in your training from the beginning. Of course a young puppy’s rambunctiousness will interfere with its attention time span for learning some complex tasks!

By 15 weeks, the puppies will have learned their rank in the dominance hierarchy and play fighting will decrease. The more dominant puppies will hold their tail erect, growl, and will place their front paws and jaws over the forequarters and back of the neck of the other more submissive puppies. More submission puppies will flatten their ears, cower, and crouch with their tail between their legs.

Males will begin to lift their leg when they urinate between the ages of 5 to 8 months. This is also when they will learn to scratch the ground after they defecate. These behaviours indicate sexual maturity. At this time, the dog may also begin establishing its territory by peeing on posts and other objects.

The puppy’s second set of teeth appear around week 16. Once they have their adult teeth, they’ll be able to chew hard objects and bite effectively.

Usually the answer is they become a senior canine citizen between the age of 8 and 10. Their needs are changing and their activity levels are decreasing. This special page will address some concerns and highlights of our Golden Retriever’s senior years.

Nutritional Needs

I found that Winger’s nutritional needs changed when he is 11. He had been on a raw diet since he was 4 or 5 years old because of his complete intolerance to all grains. I had a harder time keeping weight on him as he got older. He definitely has less muscle and it’s probably because of that that his spine appears to stick out more. He seemed to need more protein to keep his muscle tone. This observation is mirrored in the newest trend of dog food companies changing their senior formulas from lower protein to higher protein. I recommend avoiding senior commercial pet foods that have lower protein and higher grain content because protein is so important to an older dog.

Arthritis

My Winger had arthritis from his hip displasia. Liquid Glucosamine is the best non-prescription treatment I’ve found to keep him mobile and keep him from getting too stiff. We had success with Syn-Flex and Flexicose. If your senior has arthritis, exercise is still important. It keeps their muscles developed and helps work out their stiffness.

Grooming

Grooming your senior dog is just as important or more important in their older age than when they are young. Sometimes their coats may become dryer and may mat easier as they age. It’s also an excellent opportunity to feel for lumps and bumps and monitor their size and the condition of your dog’s skin. Your older dog probably doesn’t exercise as much as when they were younger, meaning their nails will have less opportunity to wear down. This means you need to make sure you trim your dogs nails often – preferrably at least every 3 weeks if not more often. Long nails can affect your dog’s movement and can cause leg and back problems.

Exercise

Exercise is still important for senior dog. It helps keep your dog healthy by keeping their weight down, and their muscles toned. It is also important for their heart and circulatory system, as well as their lungs. Instead of one long walk a day, a couple shorter walks may suit your senior dog better. A bonus to having a senior dog is they can often obtain enough exercise while still on a leash!

Things to Watch for

Keep your dog’s weight within a healthy range. Monitor their breath and mouth for signs of bad teeth or periodontal disease. You need to bring your dog to a vet right away if you notice sudden weight loss, a serious loss of appetite, increased thirst, frequent urination, coughing or excessive panting.

Senior Dog Conditions

It is important to have your dog receive a full vet check-up when they become a senior. This vet visit should include a full blood panel so you have base line values to compare with should they become sick in the future. A yearly blood panel and urine test can also help your vet monitor your dog’s liver and kidney function. Some diseases and ailments found in older dogs include: Cushing’s Disease, diabetes, arthritis, cancer, kidney disease, liver disease, and heart disease.

Pet Insurance

Many pet owners invest in pet insurance for piece of mind that they won’t be caught short of cash should an emergency arise with their pets. Just because your dog is a senior now, that does not mean you can no longer take the advantage of having coverage. Quickcare is a pet insurance company that has put together a special insurance package specifically for seniors with extensive coverage and fixed deductibles! (link: QuickCare Pet Insurance Programs) If you don’t have pet insurance, please try to have a ‘reserve’ built up. Senior dogs can require extra medical attention in their last days. Surf’s last week before she died cost me $1200 in vet visits, prescriptions, x-rays, and blood work. Try to keep a credit card empty or have a credit line available so you can do everything you want to should your dog become sick.

Senior Dog Quirks

What is a hot spot?

A hot spot is a moist, smelly, raw area of the skin. The skin is normally oozy and it smells quite bad. Sometimes hot spot can occur without your dog ever chewing or scratching at the area. They can appear overnight, one day nothing, the next day a big oozy raw mess.

Theories differ from the reason why these hot spots occur. Some people think they are caused by bacteria. Others think they are caused by the dogs body expelling a toxin out of their skin. Sometimes they can occur just from irritation.

Lick granulomas can also develop into a hot spot. A lick granuloma is an area a dog will excessively lick and chew – often on their legs and feet. The area will first be pink, raw, and irritated, but can develop into an oozy hotspot without intervention.

Hot spots can also occur from allergies, sensitivities, and other intolerances. Fleas can be be one of these causes. Some dogs are more sensitive to fleas than others. When my dogs had just a few fleas, they chewed off their backsides and developed hot spots all over. Other causes include: food allergies, anal glad problems, grooming neglect, insect bites, and even stress.

Hot spots are also called acute moist dermatitis, moist eczema, or summer sores.

How do I treat a hot spot?

If the hotspot is still small, you may choose to trim the hair with scissors. Larger hotspots should be shaved, including at least an inch around the hotspot. Clipping or shaving allows air to get at the hotspot to allow it to dry. Your dog is going to lose the hair where the hotspot is, if he/she hasn’t already. There is no way to prevent the hair loss. Don’t worry, it will grow back! (I know, small consolation if you have a show coming up!).

You will read all sorts of seemingly crazy ideas to get rid of a hot spot faster. I have tried almost every one. The only one I found that seemed to work better than the rest, was squeezing a Vitamin E capsule on the area. Other ideas include; green tea bags, Gold Bond Powder, sulphur powder, . For very moist hot spots, the application of a powder seems quite counter productive. While they will help form a crust over the area, the wet moist infection will still be raging underneath.

When my dogs have had a bad hot spot, I take them to the veterinarian. The vet will clip the area and clean it. When the are particularly green and gooey, my vet has prescribed an antibiotic, and a hydrocortisone cream. I have heard of very large hot spot receiving a cortisone injection by a veterinarian.

How do I prevent hot spots?

There are some things you can do to prevent hot spots. Never let your Golden Retriever go to sleep wet after swimming, or a bath, or walking in the rain. Thoroughly dry your dog with a towel, or use a blow dryer if you have to. Hot spots that occur from your dog being left wet are normally located in the folds under the legs, behind their ears, under the neck – any place where the air can’t get to.

Groom your dog regularly. Not only will you remove possible irritants (you know the items your dogs can pick up in their coats! burrs, sticks, thistles, grasses etc) and remove the loose hair, but you can also look for any sign of fleas.

One of my Golden Retrievers seems to be allergic to any and all grains. If he has as much as one MilkBone treat, he will have a hotspot within 2 days. With a grain-free diet (including no rice) he does okay (ie. a raw diet, home made diet, or a duck and potato kibble diet).

One option is feeding your Golden Retriever a raw diet. Sometimes referred to as “BARF”, which stands for Bones and Raw Food, this diet involves feeding your dog primarily raw meaty bones.

In humans, blastomycosis is also known as Gilchrist’s disease, Gilchrist’s mycosis, Blastomyces dermatitidis, and Chicago disease.

Without proper diagnosis and treatment, Blastomycosis can be fatal.

For more information about Blastomycosis, visit http://Blastomycosis.ca.

Blastomycosis has also been reported in other animals, including the horse, cow, cat, bat, and lion.

After exposure to Blastomycosis, it may be weeks or months before you dog is showing symptoms. If a dog only inhales a few spores and is healthy, it is possible for his immune system to eliminate the spores. However if the amount of spores is great, or if the dog is immune suppressed or fighting another disease they will have a greater chance of taking hold within the lungs. As the single-celled yeast they become in the lungs, they can multiple rapidly.

Diagnosis
To diagnose Blastomycosis, you need to get a positive sample of the blasto yeast from a lymph node or draining skin lesion or possibly by doing a lung wash, and maybe by sampling material coughed up by the dog. It is very difficult to get a positive sample, and there are many false positives and negatives when trying to diagnoses blastomycosis. A chest x-ray will confirm the symptoms, but not definitively diagnose the condition. Chest x-rays often show a “fluffy snowstorm” appearance to the lungs, which are the fungal organisms and associated inflammation.

Treatment
One informational site says that “About 65 percent of dogs diagnosed with blastomycosis do survive. Because the treatment is long, complicated, and expensive with the potential for serious side effects, some owners elect to euthanize affected pets. In treated dogs, survival rates are approximately 85 percent, with up to 25 percent suffering relapses. Dogs with brain or eye involvement have a worse prognosis, and dogs with poor liver or kidney function may not be able to tolerate the necessary medications that must be metabolized by these organs. If an eye is involved, it usually must be removed since eyes don’t respond well to therapy and serve as a source of infection.” (source). Personally, and unfortunately, all the stories I have heard about blastomycosis in the last week have involved the death of the dog.

The treatment drugs of choice are amphotericin B, Ketoconazole and Itraconazole. Treatment is very expensive, and all figures I have read this week report costs incurred over $5000 Cdn. More information about these drugs for treatment, the use and side-effects can be found on this page
Even if the drug treatment is successful, it will not reverse any spinal or bone damage, or blindness. Even after treatment, the infection can remain dormant for many years and then reappear. However, after a year of remission without disease recurrence it is unlikely that your pet will have another occurrence of the disease.

Last month, with my “puppy” lying at my feet, I would never have believed I would be writing this note so soon. Laika was such a big part of my life, and I had hoped we would have many more years together before it was time for her move on to the greener hunting grounds. As my daughter noted, she was like the third child in the family, the one who unlike the others would never leave home and would always stay with me. Although over the years, ever since growing up in Finland, I’ve had many dogs, Laika was special: she was my first competition dog, my first Golden, and my constant companion, accompanying me on working trips on forest trails, being by my side when I was working on the computer, following me around the house and the yard, and sleeping under my bed at night. It’s those times I remember, both the quiet and the wild, as well as all the fun we had learning clicker training, obedience, tracking, retrieving, and agility together. In the end our moments together were reduced to her licking a bit of yogurt from my finger and to a flicker of recognition from her tired eyes.

Ever since a pup, tracking was her favorite activity. She had a wonderfully acute sense of smell (that sometimes got her into troubles!) and learned quickly the idea of finding “lost objects” and following human tracks. She never failed me at a tracking test and got her CKC and AKC Tracking Dog and Tracking Dog Excellent titles all on the first tries. In June 2003, we traveled to Prince George where she delighted me by passing her Canadian TDX with flying colours. In September 2004, she passed her American TDX at Fort Lewis, Washington; I wrote about this wonderful experience in a previous issue of Golden Tails. We were practicing for the new urban tracking titles, and on a stormy morning at a tracking workshop last February she amazed me by tackling a 12-hour old track.

She was a gentle soul who always enthusiastically greeted people, never harassed rabbits, cats (well, the small black cat that runs deserves to be chased), or chickens, and respected the no-dog zones in the house and yard that were marked with flags. She was a therapy dog with the Pacific Animal Therapy Society and brought moments of joy and recognition to the residents of the Broadmead Logde, where she visited every Sunday for about a year. Earlier this summer we moved to a small hobby farm near Victoria. Laika enthusiastically approved of the new quarters and for a brief time enjoyed fetching the ball and running through the newly cut hay.

She died of cryptococcosis, a rare but emerging fungal disease of mammals that is becoming more and more prevalent on Vancouver Island and has also been detected on the Lower Mainland just recently. There have been several cases in cats and dogs and a few in humans since the disease was first found here. Most of what we know about the disease comes from studies in Australia. Cats are particularly susceptible and may be considered sentinels of the disease, but symptoms are often more severe in dogs. Transmission is from spores in the air and not from mammal to mammal, as far as it’s known. Although in humans the disease often attacks immune-compromised individuals, there is no such relationship in dogs and apparently healthy individuals are often affected. As the vet said, Laika just happened to sniff the wrong bush at the wrong time. Symptoms vary but often involve the respiratory system. The fungus has usually been present for 8 – 10 months in the body before any symptoms are noted.

Laika first showed signs of being sick in June, when I noticed she had very low energy and her breathing sounded hoarse (there was an earlier incident of hair loss from a toe in February that might have been related). I was very alarmed, but the vet found nothing wrong with her. Since she seemed better next week, I ran her in a WC test (she passed, after an incident of a loose puppy snatching the duck from her mouth!). In the beginning of August, the symptoms returned, and she was down, listless and not eating, by the end of the week. A bit of detective work led to a positive diagnosis with Cryptococcus. By that time she had systemic mycosis that had invaded her respiratory and central nervous systems. She struggled on for a week on aggressive drug therapy, but the disease was too far progressed and had damaged the brain. The therapy was very harsh and involved subcutaneous and oral administration of two different fungicides. A massive die-off of fungi in the brain as result of the treatment caused inflammation and neurological symptoms. Had she been an older dog, I would have hesitated before putting her through the treatment. That said, if detected early enough, before CNS involvement, the prognosis is excellent and a return to a normal life is possible. However, the therapy is long-term and very expensive, and prospects of a total cure are uncertain. Unlike in Australia, vets in Victoria have had little luck in totally eradicating the fungus from the body of affected animals. Diagnosis is through a blood test or nasal smear.

Would I have done anything differently? Had I known what was to come, I would certainly have followed up on her earlier respiratory episode in June and tried to get the bottom of it. I don’t think there is any reason to panic or to avoid traveling with your dog. One can come into contact with the fungal spores anywhere; apparently there’s an indoor cat in Oak Bay in Victoria that has the disease. Fortunately, the disease is still rare. All we can do is to follow up any suspected symptoms (sometimes more than one test might be required, as blood tests are not fool-proof), point out the possibility to our vets who might rarely have encountered the disease, and appreciate every day and every moment when our friends are still with us. If anyone ever is unfortunate enough to contact the disease, I’m certainly willing to share the details of my experience.

Laika had many friends all across Canada, and I thank all the various people who have expressed their sympathy. Special thanks to my training partners Maralyn and Carmela for all their help and support in the difficult last weeks, and to Maralyn for letting me have this beautiful, gentle girl and being there for us every step of the way, from the beginning to the end. Laika would have been 5 years old this September.

CROUP: The muscular area above and around where the tail connects to the body.

DEWCLAW: A fifth claw which is located in the inside of the front feet, and is higher than the other toes. Some dewclaws are removed as a puppy to prevent injuries (dewclaws can get ripped or torn – always keep your golden’s dewclaws trimmed short).

HOCK: The joint on the rear of the back legs, between the rear pastern and stifle.

LOIN: The section of the body located on both sides of the backbone between the ribs and the hips.

MUZZLE: The front part of the jaws.

PASTERN: The section of the leg below the knee of the front leg or below the hock of the hind leg.

STIFLE: The knee joint of the hind leg. “Hindquarter Angulation” refers to the angle formed at this joint.

STOP: The frontal portion of the skull between the eyes and the top of the head.