Two Weeks Old, Eight Pairs of Open Eyes — The Game On Litter Turns Fourteen Days

The five Game On girls — Purdey, Diver, Domino, Wildcard, and Skeet — on their two-week birthday, lined up in a Winchester cartridges crate in front of the sunflowers. The day every eye in the litter finally opened.

Two weeks old today. Eight English Springer Spaniel puppies, born into a sunflower-and-shotgun-box world, who arrived on the morning of May 26 as small content sausages and who, as of this morning, are eight individuals with eight pairs of newly-open eyes.

We marked the milestone the way we mark all of them at Three Doves — with photographs, with a kitchen scale, and with a few minutes of standing back and looking at what we have. What we have is a strong, healthy, photogenic litter that has just sailed cleanly through two of the most important first-two-weeks gates a litter can pass: eye-opening and the first kilogram (over 2 pounds — while we have no love for the metric system, grams are easier to keep track of than fractional ounces with the puppies).

The headline: all eight eyes are open

Yesterday's blog post reported that five of the eight had begun to open their eyes — Purdey, Hunter, Tracker, Domino, and Skeet. As of this morning's check, the remaining three — Diver, Wildcard, and Trap — have joined them. The whole litter cleared the eye-opening gate inside a single twenty-four-hour window, which is about as tight a spread as we've ever seen on a litter of eight.

First look. Purdey this morning — newly-open eyes, still figuring out what 'across the room' means.

The visible eye at this age is, candidly, not yet a useful eye — the retina and visual cortex have another two weeks of maturation ahead of them, and what the puppy sees is still soft, blurry, and very poorly-focused. But the direction of light is now a thing they're aware of. Brightness, shadow, and motion all just came online for the litter, and the next two weeks of socialization work will look very different as a result.

The other headline: five of eight have crossed 1 kilogram

This is the morning the litter's weight chart visibly graduated. Eight days ago, the heaviest puppy in the box was 870 grams. Today, five of the eight are over a kilogram:

he chart shows all eight ranked with weight, gained-overnight, multiple-of-birth-weight, and eye status, plus the milestone ribbons.

The average overnight gain across all eight puppies was 84 grams per puppy — a strong, even Day-13-to-14 jump. A few small notes worth pulling out of that table:

- Purdey is now at 2.95× her birth weight on Day 14, and threatens to be at 3× before bedtime tomorrow. She is the unambiguous size leader of the litter.
- Diver was the biggest gainer overnight at +105 g (3.7 ounces) — and is now ten grams short of the kilogram club. Given the trajectory, she will almost certainly be the sixth member tomorrow morning. She has quietly closed the gap with Wildcard over the last four days from 65 grams to ten.
- Wildcard hit 1,000.00 grams on the nose — one of those moments where the scale appears to know what day it is. Born the smallest puppy in the litter at 360 grams, she is now at 2.78× birth weight, the highest relative growth of any of the L/W puppies.
- Skeet remains the lightest at 930 grams, and is still comfortably over 2× birth weight (2.42×). Her growth curve has been one of the most consistent in the litter — small but steady, no falter days.

The boys' portrait

The three Game On boys — Trap, Tracker, and Hunter — at two weeks. All three liver and white; all three crossed (or stayed well over) one kilogram today.

It is worth a separate paragraph to note that all three of the boys are over one kilogram as of this morning — Hunter at 1,200 g, Tracker at 1,065 g, Trap at 1,015 g. They are also all three of the same color: liver and white. Two of them, Tracker and Trap, joined the 1-kg club only today; Hunter has been a member since Day 12.

For the families considering one of the two unallocated males (Trap and Tracker, both L/W), these are not small or hesitant puppies. They are gaining 85–95 grams a day, they are settled and tolerant when handled, and their growth curves are right where you'd want them.

Two weeks in, sixteen days of ENS almost done

Today is Day 14 of the [Puppy Culture / Early Neurological Stimulation program](https://www.three-doves.com) — the protocol where each puppy gets five short, deliberate stress exposures every day from Day 3 to Day 16. We are two days away from the end. ENS is the early intervention that researchers (originally the US military's biosensor breeding program in the 1970s, and later Carmen Battaglia for the AKC) have correlated with adult dogs that are calmer under stress, more cardiovascularly fit, faster to recover from novelty, and less likely to drop out of working programs.

By the time families pick up their puppies in late July, every puppy in this litter will have received roughly eighty short stress-conditioning sessions in the first sixteen days of life, on top of the eye-opening, ear-opening, and sound-exposure work that comes after.

What's next

Six weeks to Go-Home Day. Between now and Sunday, July 26 the Game On puppies have an eye exam in Kirkwood, a fecal check, a week of Volhard temperament evaluations, a bird-and-water introduction, an 8-week wellness exam and vaccinations with our vet, and a final show evaluation — each one a piece of the puzzle that determines which puppy goes home with which family.

The go-home date has been firmed up at Tuesday, July 26 — eight weeks and two days from whelp. (Buyers who saw an earlier "week of July 21" reference: please update your calendars to July 26.)

Six more weeks. They are unmistakably little dogs now.

And then there's the dog who actually did the work

Etta and all eight, two weeks in. She has earned every nap she takes this week.

It's easy, in a blog post about milestones, to write a thousand words about what the puppies did and forget about the dog who actually fed them. So here is the photograph we want to leave you with.

This is Etta, two weeks into being a mother of eight, doing the same thing she has done quietly and reliably every two hours for the entire fourteen days these puppies have been alive: lying still while eight small mouths nurse, eight small front paws knead, and eight small bodies pile against her belly in a heap of warmth.

A nursing English Springer Spaniel dam at two weeks is producing somewhere on the order of 1.5 to 2 liters (1/2 gallon) of milk per day to support a litter this size — milk that is, gram for gram, the reason every one of these puppies is now more than twice their birth weight. Etta has lost noticeable weight herself doing it. She eats three full meals a day now, plus a bedtime snack, and we are quietly upping her food again this week as the puppies' demand keeps climbing.

She is, in every meaningful sense, the engine that produced the chart at the top of this post.

For the families who are watching this litter grow up at a distance — when you collect your puppy in late July, please thank Etta. She is a quiet, sweet, hard-working girl who has now whelped and raised a litter we are very proud of, and she will be the reason your puppy arrives at your door healthy, well-grown, well-socialized, and ready for the rest of their life.

We'll see you all tomorrow with Day 15.

— Albert & Terra