Puppies

Quick Overview

At 11-15 Days, puppies’ eyes open. At 15 Days, puppies can begin eating small chunks of regurgitated meat. When they are 20-21 Days, puppies begin hearing more clearly, and begin babbling (making word-sounds) instead of just whimpering and crying.

At 5 Weeks (35 Days), weaning commences. Puppies learn their names and can follow very simple commands. At 6 Weeks, puppies speak their first words. When they are 7 Weeks, puppies should have a 5-20 word vocabulary, and begin speaking their first two-word sentences.

At 2 Months (8 Weeks), puppies generally have a 200-300 word vocabulary, and two-thirds of what they say can be understood. Puppies eyes may begin changing at this age. Puppies born on-board via puppy points are playable at 2 months. At 2.5 Months, weaning is completed.

At 3.5 Months, puppies begin to accompany adults on hunting trips. They enter a period of rapid growth. When they are 4 Months, puppies lose their puppy teeth and gain adult teeth. If their eyes have not turned from blue at this age, they will remain blue-eyed for life. Puppies begin to develop thinking in abstract concepts — e.g., dreams, hopes, and ideas.

Early shifting may be triggered in Luperci children past the age of 5 Months, with an exceptionally traumatic event provoking the shift. At 6 Months, puppies are almost fully-grown and begin shifting naturally. Though they continue growing well past the age of six months, their growth spurts have ended and they do not grow as rapidly. Puppies are articulate and able to communicate essentially as adults.

7 Months is the age of “adulthood” in-game. Packs and cultures may have different traditions for adulthood, but characters are no longer counted as puppies past seven months of age. Puppies born off-board are playable at this age.

Canines enter puberty at 8 Months. At 1 Year (12 Months), bone growth ceases; a canine is fully grown. At 1.5 Years (18 Months), individuals are sexually mature and able to produce children.

Birth – 2 Weeks

Weight: 1 lbs (.5 kg)
Approximate Human Age: 0 – 1 year
At birth, wolf pups cannot see or hear. Their sense of smell is limited, and they are entirely dependent on their mother. Their movements are “limited to a slow crawl” and they are unable to regulate their own body temperature.

Communication

Pups cannot speak at this stage in their lives, of course; their communication is limited to whines and yelps.

Socialization

The extent of the pups’ socialization is limited to their mother and siblings; they are able to recognize these familiar smells and react positively, especially toward the mother, who signifies an incoming meal. Puppies are dimly aware of themselves and their own bodies; their sensory input is extremely limited, and so their thinking processes are very basic, simple, and instinctive. Puppies rarely have clear memories of this time in their life. Puppies will vocalize to familiar speech of the mother or father; they often roll their heads and search for the source of the sound.

Food

Nursing puppies feed four or five times per day, and they gain two to three pounds per week.

2 – 3 Weeks

Weight: 3 – 7 lbs (1.36 – 3.17 kg)
Approximate Human Age: 2 – 3 years

Sight

When pups are 11-15 days old, their eyes begin to open, but “vision is poor and they are not able to perceive forms until weeks later.” Wolf pups’ eyes are always light blue at first.

Food

At fifteen days old, their milk teeth develop and they can begin eating regurgitated chunks of meat.

Hearing & Speech

At 20 or 21 days old, pups begin to hear more clearly. At this point they begin listening to their parents talk; they also babble, which is simply the production of language sounds and syllables. “Amazingly, during this babbling stage, [puppies] make nearly all sounds heard in all languages. Eventually, however, learning narrows the repertoire down to the sounds of the language that the [puppy] hears.” Vocalizations expand to growling and high-pitched howls.

Socialization

Puppies rapidly begin taking in their environment and understanding the small, dark world around them; they gravitate toward the end of the den from the moment their eyes open, and adults must spend a week or more ensuring they don’t venture out before they are able to. As their eyesight develops, they begin to recognize family, objects, and familiar things by sight. Puppies begin to understand their impact on the world around them.

Puppies may repeat the same behavior trying to achieve the same effect — e.g., if they scratch hard enough at the dirt, a line appears. They will repeat this behavior to make the same line, fascinated by the tiny change in the world. Puppies tend to remember events and small snippets of things that happened during this stage in their life — a clear and vivid memory of this time period is rare.

Developments

Pups begin to stand and walk. This is also the point at which young pups venture out of their dens for the first time; though they still remain underground much of the time, they will play just outside of the den and in the area directly surrounding it, though adults stop them from venturing too far.

1 Month (4 Weeks)

Weight: 13 lbs – 20 lbs (5.89 – 9.07 kg)
Approximate Human Age: 3 years

Food

At 35 days old, pups will begin to be weaned. They eat meat regurgitated by other packmembers after a kill.

Developments

Puppies begin looking more like adults — they experience fur growth around their facial features, and their bodies “take on conformation of adults with disproportionately large feet and head.”

Socialization

Dominance and play-fighting (note: animals pictured are significantly older) begin — puppies generally establish a hierarchy, and their behavior may be quite different within that hierarchy than when they are alone. Puppies are usually very dependent on their siblings at this point; however, thinking is generally egocentric. Puppies apply their own worldview rather than others’ perspectives. They also tend to engage in animism — the belief that inanimate objects are capable of actions and have lifelike qualities, such as “that root tripped me because it was angry with me.” Puppies can usually remember this stage of their lives pretty well, especially as they begin to speak.

Speech

  • By five weeks, pups will recognize and respond to their names and vocal cues without visual aids; they will begin to recognize the differences in vocal intonations between friendly and angry voices. They will attempt to vocalize speech but generally fail at it.
  • By six weeks, pups generally speak their first words and commence expanding their vocabulary. Puppies at this stage understand very simple instruction (e.g., “don’t do that”). Puppies begin to become aware of the value of communication. Their sentence structure is limited to single words.
  • By seven weeks, the vocabulary should be between 5-20 words, primarily comprised of nouns and names. There is often “echolalia (repeating a word or phrase over and over)”. Puppies also begin to voice their own emotions at this stage, using various tones and inflections to emphasize the way they feel about something. Puppies begin speaking in two word sentences with their limited vocabulary (e.g., “I drink” or “I eat”).

2 Months (8 Weeks)

Weight: 20 – 30 lbs (9.07 – 13.6 kg)
Approximate Human Age: 5 years

This is the age at which puppies born on-board at ‘Souls are playable.

Food

By ten weeks, weaning is complete, although puppies may be weaned as early as eight weeks. They still eat meat regurgitated by older members of the pack, though now the pack members will begin to bring back larger pieces of meat taken directly from the kill for the puppies.

Developments

Puppies still have disproportionately large heads and feet. Eyes may begin changing as early as two months; this development should be complete by four months of age. Puppies generally move out of their underground den by eight weeks of age — in the wild, wolves move them to what is known as a “rendezvous site.” They remain with their parents, of course. At eleven weeks old, puppies are officially considered juveniles, though they retain puppyish characteristics, including oversized feet and heads.

Socialization

This is a period of intense socialization for puppies; they begin to become aware of the differences between boys and girls (though not yet in a sexual way; more of a “oh, hey! you’re different from me!”) and adults and children. Speech means they are beginning to be able to understand and interpret the world around them, as well as articulate these things and ask questions about them. They become extremely curious and ask many questions; pups “realize they have a vast amount of knowledge but they are unaware of how they know it.”

Speech

  • By eight weeks, pups should have a vocabulary of 200-300 words. Almost 2/3s of what pups say is intelligible; pups begin to combine words together to form short sentences. Rhythm and fluency as well as volume control are poor at this stage. Puppies particularly delight in pointing out objects for their parents to name; they soon learn that some words “are not names but actions (verbs) that describe how named objects and persons affect each other.”
  • By nine weeks, pups have developed a vocabulary of 900-1000 words. Almost 90% of what they say can be understood. Pups are able to understand and answer simple questions (e.g., what must you do when you are hungry?) and they can relate their own experiences in a way that is followable; however, speech is still telegraphic — that is, containing “short, simple sentences of nouns and verbs without plurals, tenses, of function words like ‘the’ and ‘of.’ For example, ‘Ball hit Evie cry.’”
  • By ten weeks, pups are learning to use “morphemes, the meaningful units that make up words. Morphemes mark verbs to show tense (walked, walking) and mark nouns to show possession (Maria’s, the people’s) and plurality (foxes, children).” They are capable of repeating four-syllable words if given to them, and when going about their activities, they will often vocalize the steps they are taking. They may often repeat things adults say to them.
  • By eleven weeks, their speech should be completely intelligible. For the most part, speech is grammatically correct, though pups certainly may not grasp the finer points of it yet. Pups begin to understand simple time concepts (e.g., morning/night/today/tomorrow). One of the problems puppies encounter at this stage is overregularization, the improper application of a general grammatical rule to a specific exception. As English is chock full of these ridiculous grammatical exceptions, this is rather common. “For example, after learning to make past tense verb forms by adding -d or -ed, children may apply this ‘rule’ even to its exceptions, the irregular verbs, creating such nonwords as hitted or breaked. Learning to add -s or -es to make plurals, children may apply the rule to irregular nouns, as in foots or mouses.”

3.5 Months (14 Weeks)

Weight: 25 – 45 lbs (11.33 – 20.41 kg)
Approximate Human Age: 6.5 years

Developments

At this point, puppies are beginning to accompany adults on hunting excursions; though the pups do not stick around for the actual hunt, they generally return home by themselves. At fourteen weeks, puppies enter a phase of rapid growth: they gain 1.3 lbs (.58 kg) per week. Despite their growth, they remain disproportionate until much later; their feet and heads are still rather large as compared to the rest of their bodies.

Socialization

Puppies continue to develop their intellectual and logical processes; they are able to solve simple problems (like searching different places for their parents) but they are incapable of truly logical thought. An important development during this period is their self-confidence.

Speech

By fourteen weeks, puppies are making far fewer grammatical mistakes, and they are using abstract words such as “dream, forget, pretend, believe, guess, and hope, as they talk about internal states.” They begin describing and elaborating their emotions, and discerning their tastes — they also begin learning the deeper social aspects of conversation, such as “how to join a discussion, how to take turns talking and listening, and how to make contributions that are relevant.”

4 Months (16 Weeks)

Weight: 28 – 70 lbs (12.7 – 31.75 kg)
Approximate Human Age: 7 years

Developments

Puppies begin to lose their milk teeth and gain adult teeth. If they were born during spring, this is where their winter coat and adult fur would have completely grown in. By now, if a pups’ eyes have not changed from blue, they will always be blue.

Socialization

This is the stage at which puppies are completely able to “think through a series of events or the steps involved in solving of a problem and then to reverse course, returning to the mental starting point.” They are able to solve a problem entirely through “manipulating concepts entirely in their minds.” At this point, they typically lose the belief in animism and other “magical” notions (e.g., Santa Claus, if such a thing even exists for Luperci!).

Speech

By sixteen weeks, puppies “understand and use highly abstract words such as truth, justice, and idea.” At this point, they completely understand and utilize the non-verbal cues used in communication; “[a]dult speakers use body language, intonation, and facial expressions to enhance their communication. They also use feedback they get from listeners and are able to take the perspective of the listener.”

6 Months

Weight: 30 – 80 lbs (13.6 kg 36.28 kg)
Approximate Human Age: 10 years

Developments

Puppies have grown into their oversized feet and heads at this point, though they still are not quite as proportional as adults. Adolescents begin to accompany adults on hunts, though may do not participate as actively until some weeks later. At six months, the wolf’s growth slows, and they gain between .07 – .4 lbs (.03 – 0.18 kg) per week.

Luperci typically have their first, compulsory shift around this age and are able to shift thereafter.

Socialization

This age marks the expansion of cognitive thought into extremely “abstract and complex thought … the individual begins to ponder introspective problems involving ways of becoming better accepted by peers, along with abstract and intangible issues such as fairness, love, and reasons for existence.” This is the stage at which the adolescent begins to more formally develop him or herself; this is a period marked by rebellion and independence, along with a clear desire to establish him/herself as separate from siblings and parents.

Speech

By six months, an adolescent has become articulate and is capable of having an adult vocabulary; this is not to say that they are not occasionally awkward in speech and social situations (they are teenagers, after all).

7 Months

This is the stage at which puppies born off-board at ‘Souls are playable.

8 Months

Weight: 40 – 90 lbs (18.14 – 40.82 kg)
Approximate Human Age: 12 years

Developments

At eight months of age, pups and adults are nearly indistinguishable, though some may still have larger-than-normal feet. This is generally the point at which adolescents hit puberty. They begin to notice the opposite sex (or the same sex, if they’re homosexual). Their body begins to change and adapt to sexuality, although they will not complete these changes and be fully capable of bearing children until one and a half years of age. By eight months, individuals have begun to hunt with the pack at all times.

Socialization

Individuals tend to begin forming their own morality at this point — they generally move beyond the typical childhood morality governed by reward and punishment and move to deeper rationalizations, considering social relationships and positions, maintaining social order, and fairness when contemplating morality and certain situations. The most important establishment of this phase is a strong sense of self; individuals with a weak or fragmented sense of self or idea of their own character may encounter great difficulty later in life.

12 Months (1 Year)

Weight: 60 – 120 lbs (27.21 – 54.43 kg)
Approximate Human Age: 17 years

Developments

Bone growth slows considerably. Many individuals are fully grown at this stage.

Socialization

At this point, one of the primary concerns on a young adult’s mind might be their concerns for intimacy; “the individual must resolve the conflict between wanting to establish closeness to another and fearing the vulnerability and risks such closeness can bring.” Wolves are as driven to mate and pass on genetic material as humans; their heightened intelligence only complicates this matter, and typically young adults are as awkward and weird around their desired partners as regular people.

18 Months (1.5 Years)

Weight: 60 – 120 lbs (27.21 – 54.43 kg)
Approximate Human Age: 20 years

Developments

Individuals are sexually mature at this point and able to produce children. Bone growth ceases for most part and most individuals will be fully grown at this age. However, it is possible for growth to continue until 2 years of age.