Scarlet Sons K9 Repro

🧰Toolbox Tuesday🧰
Free Puppy Weight Tracking Chart

Puppy Weight Tracking

This week’s 🧰 Toolbox Tuesday resource: a Puppy Weight Tracking Chart designed to help you spot problems early and keep your litter thriving. Print it, post it on your whelping room wall, and put it to work! I’ve attached a photo of the chart, but I will have a PDF you can download & print also.

Healthy puppies should gain weight daily. It’s really that simple, but also that serious…literally the difference between life and death!

📊 Why tracking matters:

A puppy that fails to gain in 24 hours may be dehydrated, chilled, or losing the b**b competition.

A steady decline can be your earliest sign of fading puppy syndrome, long before symptoms show. Weight gain (or loss) is the earliest measurable red flag for fading puppy syndrome, hypoglycemia, or insufficient milk

Even “runt” pups should show consistent upward progress, even if smaller than their littermates.

Puppies can appear “fine” while silently declining. A gram scale sees what your eyes can’t and alarms you faster of a decline allowing to you react quickly.

✅ How to do it right:
Use a digital gram scale (ounces aren’t accurate enough).

Record gains in grams, not percentages. Patterns matter more than numbers.

Weigh at the same time daily (I recommend morning, before feeding).

You should be gauging how frequently to weigh based on the age of the puppies. As a guideline here is what I do:

Birth-2wks-weigh daily
2wks-4wks-daily or every other day
4wks-6wks-every 2-3 days
6wks-8wks- weekly

Pups should be gaining 5-10% of the previous days body weight.

Record gains per pup individually. Collar + chart =
lifesaver.

⚠️ Risks breeders overlook

Weighing irregularly hides patterns, you might miss a slow decline that could lead to further problems that could be prevented by weighing regularly.

Assuming “the runt just grows slow” is dangerous. A flat weight curve is not normal, even for small pups you should be seeing gains.

👉Gold Nugget Tip: 2 weigh-ins without gain = intervention time. Don’t “wait and see.” Step in with tube feeding, check dam’s milk, and monitor hydration before the pup crashes. If you need to tube feed keeping regular weights will become more important, weights determine the amount the puppy needs to be fed adequately. Guessing can be catastrophic!

📌 Pro Tip: Keep a color-coded collar + matching chart for each pup so you never mix up

Follow up from last week’s topic: The thermometer comes in handy here as well, you never ever want to feed a chilled pup.

Do you track weights daily? What’s your method?

Did you know that different canine progesterone analyzers use different technology? Wondfo for uses FIA, Idexx uses CLIA, etc

What’s one failed breeding worth to you?

Scarlet Sons Frenchies we are very excited to announce that Freedom has been Reserved!!!!! We will let the new owners announce!!!

📣 We still have 4 needing homes: 📣
🐶Liberty (Red Female)
🐶Firecracker (Red Pied Male)
🐶2nd pick Red Blanket pied
🐶Obsidian (Brindle Male)