Here is the ruby girl at two weeks of age:
And here she is this morning, greeting her father for the first time:
I didn’t let the boys meet the puppies until the puppies were up on their feet, looking and acting like puppies rather than potentially looking and acting like some sort of squirrel or whatever. Ish has killed, or at least been in on killing, four rabbits this year so far. His prey drive is fairly high generally and pretty much revved up this year in particular. He showed some possibly predatory interest in the puppies when they were newborns. So … four weeks, and finally an introduction, with careful supervision. No problem! He is now for sure clear on the idea that these are puppies, not prey. That does let me relax a little. I’m always careful about gates, but I was very careful indeed for the first few weeks because I did not want to experiment with Ish unexpectedly meeting puppies before I was ready. Or Conner, but Conner, though he did not show any kind of problematic behavior as far as I could tell.
Ish is seven, so he has seen … hmm … four or five litters of puppies, probably. He’s fine with puppies. Very tolerant and sweet. He lay down to talk to this little girl a minute after I took this picture. She tried to kill his ears. It was all very charming.
Her adult color, by the way, will be very close to what you see now on her ears. The body color for red Cavalier babies is quite a lot paler than the adult color will be. It’s not an optical illusion that her body looks much lighter in color than her head. That’s really the way the color looks at this age.
Ish is so very glamorous. I really can’t wait to see if any of his puppies are going to match him in that respect. At the moment, the girls have broader heads than the boys — broad is good — but they are also larger, so we shall see.
This puppy in particular has been the biggest and strongest for a long time. I think the tricolor girls have just now beaten her out for biggest in the litter. Honestly, this time around, the girls have just been no trouble at all compared to the boys!
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