Surprise!
You have reached the Puppy Uglies!
What is that?
If you have a Pomeranian puppy, you are going to have puppy uglies! They start out adorable beautiful balls of fluff. Then they start growing. Do not panic! Your dog hasn’t turned into another breed of dog! Your pup has just entered a faze where their puppy coat shed off, and their adult coat starts growing. (Many photos are included on this page.)
Your pup will be somewhere between 4-8 months old or so when your little ball of fur stops looking like a ball of fur! If your vet tells you your dog isn’t purebred at this time, you have have my permission to scream afterwards, but just smile and nod. Your dog is still 100% pure Pomeranian if you got it from me! That whispy fur, the comments from friends and spouses that say you paid what for that dog, can all be ignored. Your Ugly Duckling is just growing up into a Swan, errr a Pom!
So what do you do now? First take a DEEP breath! Know that your baby is doing what every other Pom in the world does. They are just passing through the Monkey or Puppy Uglies. It will pass the same way that a 5 year old child looses their front teeth before the permanent ones grow in. Grap your camera and take pics so you will have some before and after shots!
When the baby coat comes out, that nice fluffy stuff, they start to look like they have been shaved! They can look very ragged, or even get shorthair to the point that they do favor a longhaired Chihuahua. This is NORMAL. I promise! The coat will come back in, and that will be their adult coat. Adult coat varies, so I can’t predict how much coat your dog will have when it all comes back, but they will not look like another breed anymore in most cases. By the time they are 10-12 months, sometimes 14 months they will have a full coat. Please do keep in mind, that coats vary! A Pom in the winter with cold weather is going to have a heavier coat than an indoor Pom who has heat all winter long.
Most of you have pet Poms, but if you have breeding Poms, females will loose their coat again and again when they have heat cycles or raise puppies. All Poms can blow their coat or have seasonal shedding. Think about it, if you were locked into a fur coat in the Summer, wouldn’t you be glad to blow out most of your undercoat to be cooler? <G> Now I am going to show you examples of Puppy Uglies that my own dear dogs have grown through. I am going to start with Ginny for my first Puppy Uglies storyboard. There will be more examples of my dogs below Ginny’s, so please prepare for a LONG page! Lots of scrolling, and lots of pictures. 😉 Some of the dogs on this page, though I raised them, or both raised and bred, them were not kept in my breeding program.
Hey, it’s me. Ginny, when I first got home! I’m playing with one of my paws up.
Here I am in the floor a a bit later. Yep, I am damp from my BATH. I can be very messy at times.
LOOK at me now! I got my “Puppy Uglies”!
In this photo she is coming out of the Puppy Uglies and getting more and more of her adult coat.
Here is my beautiful Harley as we walk through his puppy-hood, puppy uglies, and into his adult coat.
Harley at five months old, deep into the coat change.
Check out this coat! The full coat is still growing in, but he’s past the “Uglies “now! (Coat is natural and not groomed for show or sculpted in these photos.)
Fiona and Sapphire through their puppy uglies. Fiona is the Beaver, and her sister is Sapphire, a blue merle. My dogs have changed a lot since these photos, but they are still excellent examples of the coat change from puppy to adult. Sapphire’s coat change was the worst I had ever seen. It was scary, but it passes and that’s why this page is here. So that you can see how this will, eventually, pass into a beautiful “swan” from the “ugly duckling”.
