Dogs and All about Them

Breeders of Toy-dogs often rear the overplus offspring by hand, with the help of a Maw and Thompson feeding-bottle, peptonised milk, and one or more of the various advertised infants' foods or orphan puppy foods. Others prefer to engage or prepare in advance a foster-mother. The foster-mother need not be of the same breed, but she should be approximately of similar size, and her own family ought to be of the same age as the one of which she is to take additional charge. One can usually be secured through advertisement in the canine press. Some owners do not object to taking one from a dogs' home, which is an easy method, in consideration of the circumstance that by far the larger number of "lost" dogs are bitches sent adrift because they are in whelp. The chief risk in this course is that the unknown foster-mother may be diseased or verminous or have contracted the seeds of distemper, or her milk may be populated with embryo worms. These are dangers to guard against. A cat makes an excellent foster-mother for Toy-dog puppies. Worms ought not to be a necessary accompaniment of puppyhood, and if the sire and dam are properly attended to in advance they need not be. The writer has attended at the birth of puppies, not one of whom has shown the remotest sign of having a worm, and the puppies have almost galloped into healthy, happy maturity, protected from all the usual canine ailments by constitutions impervious to disease. He has seen others almost eaten away by worms. Great writhing knots of them have been ejected; they have been vomited; they have wriggled out of the nostrils; they have perforated the stomach and wrought such damage that most of the puppies succumbed, and those that survived were permanently deficient in stamina and liable to go wrong on the least provocating. The puppy that is free from worms starts life with a great advantage.