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The importance of establishing a healthy, colostrum-rich immune system for puppies
Pert pooches: A puppy takes a walk with her owner, while a boy pets an amiable young dog during a walk in a park (above right)
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span class="inline inline-none">Pert pooches: A puppy takes a walk with her owner, while a boy pets an amiable young dog during a walk in a park (above right). Like infants, puppies' immune systems are still developing and vulnerable to infections, and must be fortified through proper nutrition.
Newborn puppies need all the care and protection they can get. Not just because they're unspeakably cute, but because their bodies are metabolically incapable of self-defense.
After spending the first few months of its life after conception in the safety of its mother's womb, the fetal puppy is then ejected and birthed into an alien landscape filled with dangers coming from every corner.
If it gets heatstroke, it could die. If it becomes hypoglycemic, it could also die. If it suffers from dehydration, death could soon follow.
Fortunately, most of the potential problems a puppy faces can be prevented through the application of simple care techniques, such as constantly ensuring the availability of clean water to prevent dehydration or using cool wet towels to reduce a pup's body temperature.
One potentially fatal problem that requires proactive and preventative action is the issue of infections. Puppies, after all, are not born with fully developed immune systems. Should it encounter any disease-spreading organism, the puppy will likely succumb to the maladies being carried. Some of these diseases, like the vomit-inducing parvovirus or seizure-inducing distemper, can be deadly.
'A puppy suffering from some of the deadlier versions of distemper, like the ones that cause nerve spasms, usually only has a 10 percent chance of survival,' said Sri Redjeki Rotoro, an internal, exotic and feline medicine specialist at the Cucu K. Sajuthi Veterinary Clinic in Tangerang.
This problem is especially acute in cities like Jakarta, where viruses mix up with allergens, fungi, industrial waste, contaminants and litter, making for an environment where health hazards are ubiquitous.
Thankfully, evolution has enough foresight to give a puppy's mother some of the tools necessary to keep its newborn alive, in the form of a special type of milk that mommy dogs give off right after birth called 'colostrum'.
Colostrum is an off-white liquid filled with maternal antibodies, nutrients and electrolytes that is only secreted for several days post-birth and has the effect of giving a puppy 'passive immunity' from disease, a substance so powerful that it can potentially neutralize the effects of premature vaccinations.
Note, however, that a puppy won't necessarily survive by its mother's colostrum alone. The 'passive immunity' the pup gets from its mom does not last any longer than several weeks.
What's worse, it's also possible that a mother may not be able to give its offspring colostrum at all.
For one, it may have suffered from diseases during pregnancy that may end up affecting the quality of its colostrum; the result being that a puppy would actually risk getting diseased were it to suckle on its mother for milk. According to the American Kennel Club, diseases pet owners should look out for include canine mastitis, a breast infection that causes a mother's lactating breast to be red, dark, hot and painful when touched.
Alternately, it is also possible that the mother may not recognize or love its infant, and would, therefore, refuse to give the puppy any of its colostrum.
Once this colostrum-generated immunity is gone or if a mother, for whatever reason, is unable to provide this substance in the first place, pet owners are going to have to rely on other forms of immunological support.
They will need to find foods with ingredients (such as proteins and fats) and textures (soft, wet and milky) that approximate that of the colostrum provided by mother dogs. Pet stores often provide artificial colostrum in pill and powdered forms.
Pet owners can also actually use the type of baby's milk they find in supermarkets as an alternative to colostrum, although the downside to milk designed for human babies is that it lacks the same level of immune system-boosting power that a dog's mother would provide.
Pet stores also often have various foods containing ingredients chosen to maximize puppy immunity through the use of bioactive molecules to encourage the development of useful digestive bacteria and through specialized carbohydrates to fight pathogens and infections. They also typically contain antioxidants to help reinforce the immune system and to help stabilize and protect the puppy's digestive tract.
Any pet owner attempting to give a puppy food designed to give it an immunity boost should keep in mind that the food should be presented in such a way that a puppy, with its underdeveloped digestive system, can properly digest the food.
Puppies, for instance, can't just be given nutritious albeit dry kibbles straight out of the box. Their teeth aren't strong enough to digest. Forcing them to swallow these foods can potentially cause them to vomit. After all, these puppies were evolutionarily designed to only take in warm milk.
Therefore, dry kibbles should also be dipped in milk or hot water so that it doesn't cause immune-system-reducing stomach problems that could potentially cause your efforts to backfire.
'These gradual approaches will help avoid dietary upsets. Maybe start off with only 25 percent of dried food for the first week of introducing the pup to these new foods and slowly getting to 100 percent by the fourth week,' Rotoro said.
Photos by JP/Wendra Ajistyatama
