SweetPea Pugs |  Kennel Club Pug Breeder | Microchip Implanter |  Artificial Insemination | Puppy Incubator Hire | Draminski UK | Breeder Solutions
  • Home
  • About
  • Our Dogs
  • Pug Studs
  • Pug Puppies
    • Planned 2014 Pug Litter
    • Planned 2013 Pug Litter
    • Planned 2012 Pug Litter
  • Pug Dog Care
    • Clearing Up Pug Urine
    • Important Eye Care
    • Pug Feeding
    • Exercise & Socialistion
    • Ear & Wrinkle Cleaning
    • Winter Care for Paws
    • Turmeric for Dogs
    • Misconceptions on the 'runt'
    • Questions Answered
  • Raw Food BARF
  • Pug Scams
  • Microchipping
  • Fertility & Whelping Services
    • Mating & Pregnancy Stages
    • Stud Dog Training
    • Litter Microchipping
    • Artificial Insemination
    • Hire Puppy Incubators
    • 4 Weeks free Insurance
    • Canine Pregnancy Ultrasound
    • Draminski Pregnancy Detectors
    • Draminski Ovulation Detector
    • Draminski SonTrace Ultrasound
    • Draminski DogScan Ultrasound
    • Other Draminski Products
  • DNA & Health Testing
    • PDE Health Testing
    • PKDef Health Testing
    • CHV-1 Herpes Vaccine
    • Frenchie Colours Explained
    • Understanding Dog Coat Colours
  • Tested Products
    • EzyDog - Lifejackets for Pugs
    • Dog Rocks - Garden Grass Burn
    • Fish4Dogs - Pug Food
    • Hurtta - Harness's for Pugs
    • Danish Design - Coats for Pugs
    • Vax - Cleaning Your Home
    • Simple Solution - Pug Dog Urine
    • Saunders - Dog Guard
  • Holidays
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Other
    • Pug Adoption
    • Blog
    • Commercials
    • Pets as Therapy
    • Recipes
    • Kennels
    • Famous Pugs
    • Products
    • Draminski iScan Ultrasound
  • Contact

Misconceptions regarding the 'runt' of a litter

"In a group of animals, a runt is a member which is smaller or weaker than the others. Due to its small size, a runt in a litter faces obvious disadvantages, including difficulties with competing with its siblings for survival and possible rejection from its mother. Also in a domestic dog litter, most puppies would have to make room for the runt to get milk from the mother. Therefore, in the wild, a runt is less likely to survive infancy."

The above information from Wikipedia is quite right, but. Having bred litters I can quite easily say, this so called runt can change throughout the litter depending on the puppies age. It's easy after the initial birth to label one puppy the runt. But on the other hand, wait until they are a week old and your opinions of which puppy in the litter is the runt will more than likely be quite different. As puppies develop over the first few weeks of their lives they change so rapidly it can be hard to tell a runt from the rest.

If a lot of time and effort is put into breeding a litter you are less likely to have a runt as nature does not take it's course and this runt does not tend to lag behind the rest. You weigh your puppies everyday to make sure they are gaining weight evenly. Most puppies feed every two hours from birth so their weight can fluctuate throughout the day, you may find one behind in the morning and ahead in the evening. If one slips behind for a day you work hard to make sure it has plenty of milk the next day to catch up to the rest of the litter. And now you have worked on this puppy he/she is now stronger than another one, so you do the whole routine again with a different puppy.

Monitoring in this way can decrease the chances of a so called runt. In the wild this would not happen and meaning rightly so, that the runt faces obvious disadvantages completing with other siblings for survival. Due to the lack of nutrients from minimal feeding this puppy becomes weak and all in all there probably would not be a great outcome for this pup. With supervised feeding/weaning this is very unlikely to happen.

At the end of the day, you will always have one puppy be the smallest in a litter, it's a fact! Just the same as you will have one puppy the largest. No one has ever bred a litter where all the pups weigh exactly the same throughout their lives. As they develop in the first few months of life, the females will almost always be overtaken on weight by the boys. This should not always be looked at, that they are the runt.

ABOUT US AND OUR DOGS
About
Brachycephalic Dog Care
Pug Scams & Cheap Pug Puppies
Cheap Dog Microchipping Cambridgeshire
Understanding Dog Coat Colours

USEFUL PAGES
PDE & PKDef Testing
BARF Raw Food Diet Guides
Get Microchipped
DNA & Health Testing
Dog Friendly Holidays
CONTACT US
E-mail: info@sweetpeapugs.com
Please leave a message with your enquiry & we will call you back

Draminski UK Products
Puppy Incubator Hire

SweetPea Pugs / SweetPea Frenchies / SweetPea Breeder / BreederSolutions ©2016. All rights reserved. No reproduction of any logo, image or information without prior permission info@sweetpeapugs.com