The first eight weeks of a Maritsa puppy, and why none of it can be done twice

A family on a waiting list counts the weeks from the day the litter is confirmed. The kennel counts them from the whelping box: what happens between the first hour and the eighth week is what a buyer never sees, and it decides what comes through their door. This is the order it happens in, and the records it leaves behind.

The whelping box is where the file starts

The box goes up before the bitch is due, in the quietest room of the house, with a rail along the inside walls so a puppy that pushes backwards slides under instead of being laid on. Newborn puppies cannot hold their own temperature, so the first week is the warmest and the heat comes down week by week after.

Every morning, at the same hour, each puppy is weighed on a kitchen scale and the figure goes on a chart taped to the wall. Puppies should gain every day and roughly double their birth weight inside the first ten days. One that holds the same number two mornings running is watched hourly; one that loses weight is a telephone call to the vet before anything else happens that day. The chart is the first document in the puppy's file, and it stays there.

What early neurological stimulation actually involves

Between day three and day sixteen, each puppy goes through five short exercises once a day: tickled between the toes with a cotton bud, held upright, held with the head pointing down, held on its back in the palm of the hand, and set for a moment on a cool, damp cloth. Each position lasts three to five seconds, and then the puppy goes straight back to the dam.

The rules matter more than the exercises. Once a day, never twice. Five seconds, never a minute. Every puppy in the litter, including the quiet one in the corner. It is precise handling, not play and not training, and it is not how superdogs are made. It is how a litter meets mild, controlled novelty before it is old enough to be badly frightened by anything.

Why can't the same work be done twice?

Because the animal it is done to does not stay still. A puppy's eyes open at around two weeks and its ears at around three, and from that point it takes in the world at a speed it will never reach again. Handling a three-week-old accepts without complaint is a different event for a five-week-old, and by twelve weeks in a new home the same exercise is simply a stranger doing something odd. Nothing here is repeatable. The box, the noise, the first floor under the feet, all of it is offered inside a window, and the window does not reopen.

Noise is a schedule, not an accident

From about three weeks, when the ears come on, the house stops being kept quiet on purpose. The vacuum runs in the next room before it runs in the same room. The doorbell is rung by somebody standing there. Pots are dropped, the gate is opened, the car starts under the window, a chair is dragged across tiles. Distance and volume first, then closer, and always after a feed rather than before one.

A puppy that has heard a vacuum cleaner at four weeks will sleep through one at four months. A puppy that hears it for the first time at four months will not. There is nothing clever in it: a list of ordinary household sounds, worked through in an order, and it takes less time than the washing up.

How do you take a puppy outside before it is vaccinated?

Mostly in your arms. The first vaccination happens before the puppy leaves, but the series is not finished until weeks after it goes home, and until then the ground outside carries a risk, parvovirus survives in soil. So the first trips out are carried trips. The car. The vet's table. The garden path, held. Different ground under the feet: grass, gravel, tile, a wooden step, a metal grate. One new surface at a time, ten seconds at a time, then back inside.

Meeting the adult dogs

The dam does the first teaching, and it is not gentle: a puppy that bites too hard gets a real answer, once, and learns that a mouth on skin has a consequence. That lesson is one reason a puppy should stay with its mother and littermates for the full eight weeks rather than leave at six.

Then the other adults, one at a time, on a lead, for a few minutes. Not a pack and not a party. A correction from an adult is allowed to be real (a growl, a shoulder, a turn away) but it is watched, and a puppy that has had enough is lifted out. The FCI standard for the breed, number 147, asks for a dog that is self-assured with steady nerves. A puppy does not arrive at that by itself; it reads it off older dogs, the skill it needs on the first walk in a new neighbourhood.

The seventh week: the test, the vet, the folder

Around day forty-nine each puppy goes through a short aptitude test (a stranger, a sound, being lifted, being restrained, being called) and the reactions are written down as they happen, not remembered afterwards. It is not a pass or a fail. It is a note on where each puppy starts, and it helps decide which family it goes to.

The vet does the rest: full examination, first vaccination on the schedule the vet sets, deworming dates recorded, a microchip, and the passport that carries the chip number. The AKC's breed page describes the Rottweiler as a dog developed to drive cattle and pull a cart (a working animal that had to take instruction) and a puppy leaving with a folder is the first written instruction it will carry. The pedigree, the parents' screening results, the weight chart and the stimulation log go in with it, plus a sheet on what the puppy has been eating and what to do on the first night.

What should a buyer ask for?

Not photographs. Ask for the weight chart, with dates and numbers in the same handwriting. Ask for the stimulation log. Ask which adult dogs the puppies have met, and how, and what the puppies have heard. Then ask the question that sorts kennels quickly: what does the puppy do when a stranger walks into the room? A kennel that keeps records answers from paper, in a minute. One that does not answers with adjectives.

One thing to do before the puppy comes home

Ask for the weight chart before you pay the balance, and read it. A line that climbs steadily is the plainest evidence that somebody was in the room every morning of those eight weeks, and it costs nothing to ask. Then put the same three questions to every kennel on your list (the chart, the log, the adult dogs) and compare answers rather than websites.