young puppy questions

[glenn57]

i have a 3 month old pure bred chocolate lab. i have 2 questions. is it normal for pups to gorge themselves with food and water till there tummy is bulging to the hilt? this is making it extremely difficult to huose train her. i have 2 older dogs (black lab & sheltie) both pure breds and cant remember these doing this. we conrol her food at all times, but the water she seems to want to drink to fill up then she tinkles at will. she has been steadily imporing otherwise in the potty traianing dept. question 2: being shes a pure bred chocolate will her nose stay brown. thanks in advance for any input.

[metrojoe]

How much food are you giving her? I would also take the water away if she is constantly in it. I think she'll grow out of that. I guess I had the opposite problem with my ES. I couldn't get her to eat much. I also have a lab/springer mix that would eat until he passed out. I've made more than one trip to the vet because he got into his food. He ends up laying around the house in pain for a few days, but all it takes is a prescription from the vet to get things moving again. Dopey dog.

Can't help you with the nose thing though.

[LABS4ME]

I schedule feed and water my dogs. Free water is only available when they are outside in the heat of the summer. I never have a weight issue with a dog and they know to drink when water is presented (which is several times a day)... it really helps when out hunting. They even know the command "have some". They are not allowed to 'tank up' on anything. I've had many many labs that are gorge'rs. My current 13 year old lab will still do it to this day. She busted out of her crate in the garage the other day and proceeded to eat 5-10 pounds of dog food and cleaned up the cat food that was in their bowls and found a bag of snacks and candy bars I had left from hunting.... all gone in a couple hours... she looked the part too!

Yes your chocolate will always have a brown nose. Chocolate is a mutation of the black gene and they always have the carmel eyes and brown nose.

Yellow is recessive and depending on whether they recieved a dose of the dominant (black) or mutated (brown) gene, will decide if they have dark eyes, black lips, eye rims and nose, or "duddley" brown noses, eye rims and lighter eyes.

Good Luck!

Ken

[glenn57]

thanks for the feedback. currently we feed the pup 2/3rds of a cup of puppy food twice a day, once in the am then in the pm. our other dogs have there food out at all times, except for now with the youngin around, and they only eat at nite when we get home from work. ive never really wanted to ration there water supply but it seems thats not a bad idea.

[MNpurple]

I took the opposite approach as you and had food available at all times but my pup, who is 11 months, never felt the need to gorge. SHe eats a little bit, then goes and lays down or plays with something, eats a little more and after a couple hours it is usually gone (3 cups, morning and night).

When I was trying to housetrain water is what I limited, I let her drink when she wanted but was more than willing to cut her off and then give it again sometime later and I alwasy cut her off by 8pm. If makes it so much easier on yourself for housetraining if you know when and how much they drink. Now thats she is trained she alwasy has water available.

[glenn57]

thanks for the tips. im already starting to do some of these things and noticing improvements. next, keeping her from checking out the neighborhood.