Week Five

August 26, 2005: Feeding the crew has changed over the past few days. All the puppies understand how to eat out of a bowl, so it is no longer necessary to feed them one at a time. We use 2 bowls, we're feeding a couple of cups of food per "sitting". I just scoop the food out of the casserole dish in the refrigerator, I'll let Linda speak to how the food gets into the casserole dish. And, yes, it looks a bit like refried beans. We have a smaller ex pen inside the ex pen. The smaller ex pen is a 2' tall ex pen loaned to us by Maggie, a corgi friend of ours. We first lock the door of the smaller ex pen with all the puppies outside of it. We can then get the bowls ready without 9 puppies to move out of the way. They all understand what is about to happen, and you can see from the pictures above they are NOT patient!

The door swings open and they come rushing in. Sometimes one or more of them will be confused and think they are locked out, when they simply need to walk over to the door to get in. The feeding frenzy begins! We then close the door and lock them into the smaller ex pen. We can then clean the larger ex pen, without 9 puppies to move out of the way. We leave them all in the smaller ex pen until all the food is gone, and they spend a fair amount of time cleaning the food off of each other. Then, they impatiently wait to get out of the smaller ex pen, where Snicker completes cleaning them off, and then stands to allow them to nurse. This gives us time to go into the smaller ex pen to clean up in there.

Start to finish, it takes between 45 minutes and an hour.