On April 19th, 2015, we brought home a tiny toy red poodle puppy who we named Mochi. Harry and I had been married just shy of four months, and after moving into our newly renovated flat, we felt that we could add a new furry member to our family. We were hesitant about our two week holiday in Holland coming up in mid-June being too long to leave a puppy with our helper or with Grandma/Grandpa (my parents), but my mom had found an adorable brown toy poodle in a pet shop called Lego Pet in Mong Kok and the pictures she sent me of the poodle were too cute to ignore. However, the next day when I went to go see the poodle, it had been sold already the night prior (just a few hours after my mom took the photo) for a whopping $12,800! Disappointed as I had gotten emotionally and mentally ready to take home the new puppy if he was available, we visited a smaller branch of Lego Pet in the same neighborhood and found three tiny red toy poodles huddled together in a cage. The price label read a much more reasonable $6,800. After evaluating the three pups, I chose the most active one with a cute button nose and put down a deposit of $1,000 for him after taking him to get checked out at a vet next door to the shop. The precious little guy weighed only 0.60 kg! In hindsight I would have researched a good vet in advance to take him to get checked out, because the vet next to the shop didn't identify a genetic condition that Mochi had called luxating patellae -- I found out he had this only after I brought him to Hung Hom Veterinary a few days later. By that time of course I wasn't going to bring Mochi back for a refund! But had I known about his condition in advance I would have thought twice before taking him home, because it usually requires surgery at the age of 18 months.
At the store Mochi was very quiet yet alert, but when we brought him home he became a fur ball of energy and was jumping around all over the place! The pet shop had told us to keep in his crate for one week so that he could "recharge" himself since his immunity levels would be very low after the stressful transition of going into his new home. However, after phoning with a puppy trainer at the SPCA, she begged me not to keep him crated up and said that I could let him roam around the house in a supervised manner. The first time that we did this he tore through the house like a Tasmanian devil and I was afraid that he would hurt himself as he was fearless and disregarded table legs, walls, cabinets, etc.! The very next day, whilst Harry was away in China for work, I let him out and he jumped over my knee while I was kneeling on the floor, and he landed on his precious tiny leg and started to limp! Panicked, I called an Uber and brought him to Catherine Cormack, my friend from bootcamp who also was a veterinarian at the Hung Hom Vet. Thankfully she was able to squeeze me into her morning schedule, and Mochi got a painkiller shot as well as five days of medicine. It was during this visit that I found out about Mochi's genetic condition, luxating patellae, where his knee joints pop in and out of their sockets and eventually cause arthritis. During this visit he also got weighed and he was 0.65 kg. The vet said we could increase his food, which we did because up to that point we had fed him 3x per day as the pet shop suggested, but I felt that he was starving every time we fed him so I increased his feeds to 5x per day (every four hours) and fed him on the higher end of the suggested amount for his weight. We were feeding him Clinivet puppy food, which is the food that he had been fed at the pet shop. We also gave him a spoonful of ProLife soft food with each meal.
In the first week of Mochi's arrival, it was a constant game of trial and error as we tried different ways of feeding, sleeping arrangements, crates, puppy proofing, etc. I visited pet stores near and far to find a harness that would fit him but he was just so little and everything was too big. Finally, I found a tiny harness in a CWB pet shop that barely fit him and we began to walk him around the house on a leash. Dr. Cormack suggested that we get him a little T-shirt for sleeping, but all the puppy clothes I found in stores were too big for him!
Mochi's visit to Hung Hom Veterinary Clinic
Mochi had slept through the first night without waking up, but on the subsequent nights he began whining and squeaking a few times a night and we woke up tired and ragged -- it was like having a new baby! After some more trial and error, we figured out that if he got some good exercise before sleeping he would be able to sleep more or less through the night. We found out that Mochi was very alert and smart and was able to pick up tricks quickly -- within the first week he learned to "sit" as well as go "down." Now we are working on "shake hands!"
Mochi "sit" and "down" !
Mochi's first walk around the house on a leash
A week after our first visit to the vet, I weighed Mochi on my baking scale and my eyes popped out -- he had gained 38% of his body weight and was now close to 0.9 kg! I couldn't believe this and checked with the vet -- and she said this was quite normal. The following day we took Mochi to the vet for a treat (a tip suggested to us by a dog trainer) so that he would have a positive association with the clinic -- and he was almost exactly 1 kg! Mochi is a very very food-motivated dog so he ate up the treat quickly and was in a quiet sleepy food coma almost all the way home. One day later (today actually) we went for his second booster vaccination shot and we were surprised to find out that he had gained weight yet again and now came in at 1.12 kg! The T-shirt that was too big for him the week before was now tight on him -- we had missed the window of it fitting perfectly altogether! According to weight charts, he was perfectly on the route to become 4-6 lbs as a fully grown toy poodle. With the way he is eating, the vet said that he might even become bigger than that!
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