The Ultimate Guide to Whelping Boxes for Puppies: Creating a Safe Haven for Newborns
New puppies need their Mother, and they need comfort, warmth, safety, and your attention to detail. But a litter of new pups means that everyone’s anxiety and workload is about to increase, so proper preparation ahead of time can ease fears that you’ll have hiccups when babies start to show up.
This is a guide to the overall concept of using a whelping box for puppies, and how you can benefit from the RACS products in the whelping space. While it’s not a step by step guide to the process of birthing puppies, per se, it should serve as a guide to basic overall concepts that are important to keeping puppies safe, warm and healthy in the immediate hours and days after the litter arrives.
If you’re not yet aware, RACS is a leading provider of products for the veterinary and animal welfare space, focused on building and selling products that help improve animal health and comfort. This includes raised flooring products and other important animal and veterinary focused items; one of which we’ll talk about in this article. Specifically we will highlight the Whelping Box products we offer.
Why a Whelping Box is important
What is a Whelping box?
It’s a contained area to keep puppies in close contact with their mother right after birth. In a box format, it allows the mother’s warmth to be spread to the puppies; while keeping wandering puppies in the first days of their lives close to the cuff.
Additionally, while this isn’t intended to be a scientifically-focused article about whelping boxes, there is some supporting evidence that this close proximity to mother and siblings can have beneficial effects regarding the microbiome for the animals.
A whelping box allows a mother to feed and rest, without being stressed by having to find errant little ones, or being worried about constantly keeping pups in line.
Why use a premium Whelping Box?
Historically in small breeding setups, you might find a makeshift box setup which allowed easier removal of waste, and newspaper or pee pads, or other flooring options that would assist in keeping newborns warm, clean and dry over the first week or so of their lives.
In the case of the Whelping Box by RACS, you can ditch the cardboard nesting box and blanket as a primary method and step up the game with the robust, heavy duty whelping setup we offer. It offers easy assembly as well.
Having an easily sanitizable, passively temperature controlled environment can be a huge benefit to a new litter and a worn out mama. It can also make whelping easier.
Our high quality build and the ability to maintain it quickly and easily means you have a perfect environment for many years’ worth of litters for your female dog. The Whelping Box Kit includes important insulative blankets that can add coziness and warmth, and other items that allow you to be ready for that litter of pups with basically a single purchase.
The case for a world Class Whelping setup from RACS
And really when it comes to animal comfort, and the ability to easily react to and work with animals, one of the best value propositions of the RACS Whelping Box is that it’s built to last for many years, and includes a lot of thoughtful, animal-centric features built into the cohesive design (we’ll cover those in a bit).
Just having a robust, well-built box design and the innovative flooring panel makes this offering a world class whelping option. The flooring panel has an expanded metal design that is coated in plastisol, which is perfect for animals because it allows drainage of urine and feces to minimize contact with the puppies. This polyvinyl coating also keeps temperature from being too cold or too hot, because it adjusts to be no hotter or colder than ambient temperature.
Having a component based box system means you can store in flat sections and clean up and handling is very easy and intuitive.
The benefits of our premium Whelping Box
- The box design keeps precious warmth from animal body heat in contained
- The flat sides offer easy clamping surfaces for heat lamps for colder environments, or for other accessories that need to be close at hand – like towels or blankets
- The extremely durable design is likely to last you for your entire career in whelping
- The component parts are sanitizable, with the flooring option being autoclave safe which makes it a best in class option for a flooring component, since it will be in contact with feces and urine at times
- Simple design is easy to put together and stores flat
- Our Whelping Box Kit is a plug-and play option for those that expect high volume or consistent breeding or littering operations
- The flooring option is strong, stable and allows air circulation underneath the animals which can prevent cold drafts, and allow for dryer, more comfortable and cleaner animals
- The larger size allows for large litters, and has enough space for mama, and all pups with more room than other options
Animal Comfort is Paramount
RACS, in everything it does, is focused on animal comfort, and enabling professionals to perform better in their work so that the comfort and safety of animals is the priority.
Our design of the world class whelping box kit we offer is not an exception.
Furthermore, we are committed to continuing to make the best in class products we are known for. This includes our raised flooring animal products, our custom flooring, and other products we offer.
Some final thoughts about using a whelping box or whelping pen in your business or at home
Whelping is a stage of life for the animals involved. It’s more than just a task for caregivers, veterinarians and breeding professionals have to perform. It’s about properly setting the stage for healthy, happy and comfortable dogs because of early familial contact, beneficial closeness, and warmth and strength from food and family.
It’s a period of time that is crucial from a cartaking perspective, as well, so it is important to have a task list, and have a proper plan in place. We think it’s important to have familiar, easy to use, and easy to clean, easy to keep warm equipment for young puppies and their tired mama. We believe we have achieved this with our Whelping Box Kit.
We would love to help you with your needs from whelping to rehabilitation, to routine veterinary services and beyond. We’d love to hear from you, and speak with you, if you need some help choosing the right product for your animal centric practice, or for your personal pets.
