Dr. Greenway offers general tips and advice for new puppy owners of things you can do during the socialization period such as grooming that will make it easier when they are older. Other topics covered in this video include nail trimming, socialization, brushing teeth, handling paws, mouth and ears.

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TRANSCRIPT:

I’m Dr. Clayton Greenway with healthcareforpets.com and I wanted to give you just some general puppy advice that I think is pretty important. We’ve got to remember that in the future there’s lots of things that you’re going to want to do with your dog. Some things are actually frightening for them like nail trims, brushing their teeth, cleaning their ears, these are things that can cost a lot of money if you’re having the veterinarian do it so you want to be able to do some of these things at home as best you can and avoid that expensive but also scary visit to the vet.

So when they’re a puppy, they’re in a phase called the socialization period where they’re accepting of things that they may otherwise find scary later in life. So what you want to do with your puppy is on a daily basis, you want to explore and feel the ears, put your fingers in there and get the puppy used to it. Same thing with the mouth and the teeth and you want to rub the teeth with your finger and get them used to that sort of thing so that tooth brushing will be easier later.

You’ll also want to take the paws, feel them, pull the arm out a little bit. This is something that you can already see with Max but he doesn’t really like me doing that and he wants to pull his arm back again but if I do this on a daily basis, he’ll become very used to it and comfortable with it. You can even go so far at some point to actually trim a nail, just one at a time on a daily basis so that it’s not a really stressful event to trim a whole bunch of nails.

By doing this you’ll get your puppy used to you doing these things, so you don’t have to pay your vet or go into the clinic to have them performed. That’s what we like to do here is try to improve your pet’s health and help you out at the same time at healthcareforpets.com.