If you’re looking to find a puppy, here are some important things to plan ahead for during his or her first year. By being intentional with the first year you are setting both you and the puppy up for success and creating rhythms you can continue for years to come!

Before you bring your puppy home it is important to find a good reliable veterinarian near you! You will have an ongoing relationship with your vet and you need to be able to trust their advice and opinions! It is worth the effort to search out a good one and not just choose the closest or cheapest one, because if you ever have an emergency when you don’t have time to look around for a good vet you need to be confident in the one that you have and have an established relationship with them.

For us we work with two different vets, Black Horse Animal Hospital and Canine Reproductive Specialty Services (CRSS). Both of these vets are extremely valuable to us and we really rely on their input. CRSS is our daily and weekly go-to for normal veterinary care and C-sections/reproductive health for our dogs. Dr. Wagner is the veterinarian there and his wife Carly is the vet tech and they own the company together and have taught us so much! They are a small professional veterinary clinic that services dog breeders like us and they have been involved in our local PAWS organization and are consistently teaching us how to do things like testing our dogs for progesterone and learning more about their heat cycles, along with puppy care and vaccinations.

Ethical dog breeders OFA or Penn Hip certify their dogs and use Black Horse to do that. They have x-ray machines and are also on call 24 hours so we would use them if we ever have an emergency over the weekend or sometime that CRSS isn’t available.

The first year your puppy will need vaccinations, dewormers, and micro chipped if that’s something you decide to do, so you will need to be going to your vet a few times the first year. We use the brand Nobivac for our vaccinations and Frontline brand for flea and tick prevention. It is also important for your puppy to have a good healthy, balanced food and we use Retriever brand hi-protein dog food for our dogs and Retriever brand puppy food for the puppies. Definitely talk to your vet and see what they recommend for dog food, but we have really enjoyed having a dry dog food for our girls (and Jackson!) and it has kept their teeth really nice.

To fill in any gaps in lack of nutrition we rely on NuVet products like NuVet plus and NuJoint. This company has been awesome to work with and they have the highest quality supplements that we have been able to find! All of their products are made in the US in a health tested facility that is FDA registered and all of their food supplements are cold-processed which allows the vitamins and nutrients to absorb more easily. Unless you’re feeding a raw food diet, almost all dog food is cooked which definitely cuts down on accessible vitamins for the dogs so that’s why we rely on a supplement, plus it definitely helps their energy and mood! We give all of our dogs the NuVet Plus daily wafers, and once they are 6 years old they start getting NuJoint as well. If this is something you might be interested in I’d be happy to share any information I know about it! NuVet is only sold through veterinarians or dog breeders so you need to use a code to order it. Rock Haven’s code is 425087.

Another thing that needs to happen the first year is registering your puppy if you live in a state that requires it. In Pennsylvania we need to license our dogs every year, and although it is fairly inexpensive ($8.50), it can be something easy to forget. We always encourage everyone to do this because it is the law and it is a source of income for the dog wardens in Pennsylvania to be able to crack down on puppy mills and unethical breeders.

The first year having a puppy is kind of like having a baby, there are so many new things to learn and implement, but with time and consistency (and a checklist!) it doesn’t need to be overwhelming!