Welcome to Birch Valley Doodles

At Birch Valley Doodles, we're more than just a breeder; we're a family dedicated to raising happy, healthy, and well-socialized puppies right from our home to yours. Our commitment to excellence ensures that your new furry friend will bring joy and companionship to your family for years to come. Ask about the discounts we offer!

Early Scent Introduction

Early Scent Introduction (ESI) is a method to familiarize newborn puppies with different smells, improving their ability to detect and recognize scents. Dr. Gayle Watkins, a Golden Retriever breeder and co-founder of Avidog, conducted a seven-year study on ESI's benefits, finding that trained puppies excelled in scenting abilities compared to those without ESI. This led to widespread adoption of ESI among breeders, enthusiasts, and the American Kennel Club.

ESI is crucial for puppies' olfactory development, particularly for service or therapy dogs. Breeders should prioritize ESI to ensure strong scent capabilities in their puppies.

Training involves introducing new scents to puppies daily from day three to sixteen of their lives, observing their reactions closely. Woods and Waters Labradors uses various safe scents for ESI.

In conclusion, integrating ESI into breeding programs enhances puppies' scent capabilities and overall performance, making it a highly recommended practice for conscientious breeders.

Sound Stimulation

After day three of our puppies lives, they are gradually introduced to more and louder noises. The goal is not to scare them, but to put them in a safe and secure environment while experiencing new noises. This strengthens puppies confidence in handling new noises later on in life. These sound include normal household noises like the vacuum cleaner, blender and hair dryer. They also have the opportunity to hear sounds like the garbage truck car noises.

Socialization

Puppy socialization starts very young with their mom and siblings. It is important for puppies to learn social ques from mom until they are 8 weeks of age. Beyond this, they receive many more opportunities to socialize before they head to their new homes. Dad is raised with the puppies and is allowed to interact with the pups at around 3 weeks of age. We have cats in the home and when they allow it, the puppies get to interact with them. They will also have the opportunity to interact with chickens.

At around 6 weeks of age, socialization is taken to a whole new level. The puppies get to go on short car rides, they are taken out to public places (but never put on the ground or anywhere but our arms) to meet as many new people as possible. 

About us

Located near Sacramento, California, we are a small home based breeder. Though we are a small operation, we take the upbringing of puppies very seriously and do everything we can to ensure our puppies turn into well rounded, easy to train companions.