Meet the puppies from Gundrift Labradors.

Your puppy has the best of care from the moment they arrive. Raised within the family home your puppy lives in air-conditioned comfort with mum as their provider, carer, nurturer and teacher.

For the first few weeks your puppy eats and sleeps and can wiggle its way to mum for milk. They can touch and taste at this stage but that is about it!

From about two weeks of age your puppy begins to open their eyes and they see the big blurry world for the first time! They begin to stand and walk and their sense of smell and hearing starts to develop. Within the family home, the television is left on for the puppies to begin their socialisation and desensitisation process making them a calm and happy puppy. Eating and sleeping are still a big part of their daily life but by the end of the fourth week we see tails wagging, barking, and they begin to play with their litter mates starting to understand the ranking process. From two weeks of age your puppy is wormed every week and they have their nails clipped for the first time. This is around the time that your puppy begins their desensitisation to human touch and is picked up for around 10 seconds and scratched on their belly before being given back to mum and their litter mates.

From around the fourth week of their life, your puppy is introduced to food other than mum’s milk and this is when their toilet training starts. We introduce pee pee pads to the whelping box to encourage your puppy to toilet away from their eating and sleeping area. There are some hits and some misses but within a couple of days most puppies have the hang of it. At around this time your puppy is learning inhibited play biting and other dog socialisation cues from living with litter mates and mum. Mum continues to feed puppy but this becomes less over time as more food is introduced and she moves into her role as teacher.

At six weeks of age your puppy is vaccinated and microchipped and given a veterinarian health check ensuring they are developing correctly. They are provided more freedom through a large play area at Australian Pet Boarding, toys are introduced and they start to meet and play with all sorts of other members of the dog world.

By the time your puppy is ready to join your family they are well on their way to being toilet trained, they have been well socialised and should be desensitised to many noises and distractions.