The puppies have started something called Early Scent Identification, but you will often hear me refer to it as ESI. The reasoning behind this is to get the puppies used to different scents earlier in life. ESI is supposed to be done on days 3-16 (just like ENS), but I chose to hold off a day being that we started ENS yesterday. We will be doing ESI in the mornings and ENS in the evenings as they are not to be done too close together.
The basics of it are holding a natural scent, no chemicals or any types of meat or food, in front of the puppies nose and simply taking down some notes on how each of them respond. They will either have a positive, negative, or neutral reaction to the experience. Having a negative reaction is perfectly fine, there are no wrong answers in this exercise, but they should never have a stressful experience.
Today’s scent was some fresh rosemary that was still growing outside. Being that this was fresh, all I had to do was squeeze the sprig between my fingers, this releases the oils and smells of the plant. This is generally a tough thing for me to videotape, but I will try my best to get everyone’s reaction at least once over the next week.
River, Chessie, Sky, & Brooke all had neutral reactions while Seven had a positive reaction and Goldie had a negative reaction.
Here is Brooke sniffing her rosemary!
ENS went well today. No huge change between yesterday and today, but it does seem that everyone is much more settled into a routine and Tipsy is continuing her motherly duties. She has always loved to lay with the puppies even when they are not nursing.
We had our first nail trim for these guys around here. To give an idea of just how tiny their nails are at this age, about 1mm in width and 2mm in length. We use human nail clippers to trim their nails at this age. The jagged edges will scratch Tipsy’s belly as they nurse, so we take a nail file and do a fast clean up around the edges. At some point we will switch to a Dremel tool to start the desensitization process.
108 Tiny Nails ✅
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