Episode 37 - Puppies That Shiver After First Solid Foods

Episode 37 - Puppies That Shiver After First Solid Foods - Are They Cold or Calibrating?

12/23/2025

This episode is about the possible reasons why very young puppies sometimes shiver after big sensory experiences, especially after eating food from a dish for the first few times.

We discuss:

The neurological organization function of shivering
Different theories about shivering after new experiences, such as being put in a new room or eating food for the first time
How shivering may prime the puppies' sensory system for “wonder”

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To read the transcript for this episode, click the link below.

Transcript - Episode 37

I'm Jane Messineo Lindquist, and this is a Puppy Culture Potluck podcast. You bring the topics, we bring the discussion.

This episode's topic is about puppies that shiver after new big sensory experiences, particularly after eating. And I'm not going to read the original post because the topic came up in the comments on the post. But what I'll say generally is that the post was a video of a three and a half week old puppy that had just eaten a meal and was vocalizing.

And the puppy also happened to be sort of trembling or shivering. And a number of people wrote in, well, you know, the puppy's too cold. He needs look, he's shivering. He needs a heat source. And the original poster replied, it's 75°F in the room. Should be warm enough. It was not a breed that was extremely small or tended to run cold.

In fact, it's a breed that probably runs hot. So I mentioned that shivering is common when puppies are first consuming food on their own, or even just drinking milk on their own. And I used to think that it was because the food was too cold or the room was too cold. But no matter how I adjusted those variables, no matter how warm I made the room, no matter how warm I made the food, even if I added like a snuggle safe or a heat source, nothing seemed to make a difference, at least not with those first few meals.

Meanwhile, I started noticing in our discussion groups that breeders were writing in and reporting that their puppies were shaking or shivering with other kinds of new big sensory experiences, things like being carried into new room, placed on a new surface, given some sort of new tactile object or toy. And of course, often also in response to first foods.

The thing is, these events were happening generally before the initial fear response, and they did not appear to have any noticeable emotion component other than maybe the discomfort of the the shaking or trembling. And I've come to believe that this is just a sensory integration response, especially because these breeders, these other breeders have reported similar responses around this age to any new big sensory experience.

The discussion around this was super interesting. And I want to share some of these comments with you. Here's one we have always referred to this as the meat shakes, as it consistently happens after the first few meals of meat milk slurry. And then someone else said, yup, this. We see it in neonatal kittens around the same age from the same thing.

Meat shakes. Yeah. A few people mentioned seeing it in kittens, and at least one other member reported seeing it in goats as well. Here's another. Never saw it in our first 23 letters, but in current litter, two of them did that during the first week when I started to give them food, they shivered after eating maybe 15 minutes, then slept peacefully.

Always the same. Two pups. Normally I give puppies their first meal when they're 3.5 or 4 weeks old, but this time the litter was big and mama didn't have much milk, so I started warmed starter moose plus goat milk when the pups were two and a half weeks old. I didn't see it any more after the puppies were three and a half weeks.

Me talking again. Let's put a pin in that. Could there be an age differential? Here's another one. I suspect it's a physiological response to increased blood flow to the GI tract to aid digestion of the new food. At this age, the puppies have an immature system, to mean consistent or adequate hemostatic pressure in response to altered blood flow demands.

So they shiver as they have changed peripheral or other blood flow. That's just my theory. I don't know if there's any truth to it, but it makes sense to me. And then somebody responded. That was my take as well. I also noticed that their feet felt cold.

So me again, interesting blood being diverted for digestion and the immature system for maintaining hemostatic pressure. Interesting. Yeah. Could be. Especially with the sort of smoking gun of the cold feet. Here's another one. I'm not a breeder, but I did use Puppy Culture because my breeder used it and recommended it. So I read and learn and learn and read. I do have an adult autistic child and she had the same phenomenon as a young girl.

Her clinicians explained it to me and forgive me if I do not use the most technical terminology, but here's the summary. When nervous systems are in the middle of a major growth phase called the transitional period, during this window, sensory pathways touch and smell, proprioception, are rapidly turning on. The brain is shifting from primitive reflexes to early conscious processing.

The nervous system is still learning how to integrate new information smoothly. A brief shiver is the nervous systems way of calibrating itself when something new enters the sensory world. This is often called a transient sensory integration tremor. The brainstem, thalamus, cortex handoff is still stabilizing. The shiver is the bridge. The process is galvanizing the pathways that give rise to being open to a world of wonderment.

Yeah. I mean, it makes a lot of sense. Sensory integration tremor. It it does seem like a match. But note that in humans at least, the sensory integration tremors are brief and transitory. Puppies tend to shake for a good stretch after eating or having a big experience, but I definitely think that this is describing at least a component of what's going on.

You know, there's also this concept of frisson which is the chills and tremors that you get with tremendous emotional experience, like listening to music or just having any kind of like watching a movie that is very emotional. The goosebumps that you get. In any event, when the parasympathetic nervous system is activated, it can cause this kind of release that causes the body to shake.

And eating something good and pleasurable, especially if it's never happened to you before, definitely could activate the parasympathetic nervous system. That's why training with food rewards has such a strong positive effect. In human babies, I've heard this called the want shiver. If you give a baby something new, especially something they like. It can definitely elicit a shaking or shivering response.

But again, in humans at least, these are usually very short duration, just like that. As she described it, that sort of little bridge. In puppies. It tends to be of a longer duration, but I'm just going to say, let's add sensory integration tremor to this list of things that could it could either be or could be contributing factors.

Here's another comment. After food makes sense, need to be in a parasympathetic state to quote rest and digest, unquote. And then she put up a quote here. Parasympathetic shaking refers to the natural body mechanism of shaking to release tension and restore the nervous system to a calm rest and digest state after a stressful event. It's an involuntary response, also known as neurogenic tremory, that helps the body return to a parasympathetic state by releasing stored sympathetic energy.

Me again. Essentially, it's an adrenaline dump. And also just an adjacent topic that I'm not going to go way down this rabbit hole. But just because something is pleasurable does not mean it's not stressful. Big emotional events, even if it's positive emotional events, it it's stressful for the body to integrate all of this amazing knowledge that's coming in that, wow, there's this stuff I can put in my mouth, and then it goes down on my stomach and it does, oh, wow. This is amazing.

It's still stress in the sense of taxing the nervous system. And the body.

Okay. And here's a different take from another member. Could be. Interesting topic. However, shivering can definitely be caused by different physiologic pathways. Thermogenesis or sympathetic nervous system activation. One pathway is just trying to regulate body temperature. The other is responding to fear or excitement. If puppies are shaking while eating or anticipation of eating, I'd say that's maybe the same thing as integrating new experiences.

Mine shiver after meals, which sounds like a common thing, based on the comments. I think that even in a warm room, their system just needs to shiver like someone with a fever will shiver. Their core body temperature drops when they eat food other than milk the first few times. Is it possible that their thermoregulation system is just coming online fully at the age when they start eating food?

This is a really interesting comment, because this ties back to the earlier comment that someone made about younger puppies being more likely to shake, because by this theory, the younger puppies would have less well developed thermoregulation and be more likely to actually get cold when they eat. It's a really interesting and appealing argument, but I do have to say, the puppies that have done it, that I've had, that have done it, have done it, even when I make their formula that they're lapping very warm, warmer than body temperature.

So you kind of have to wonder if this were true, you know, why wouldn't they get the shakes when they nurse? Why is it when transition to food. Well, here's another theory this breeder writes in and I quote. It's called gluttony. This is why pups should have a dish each. So not to overeat. Slow and steady. It doesn't happen.

Yeah. At least 4 or 5 breeders wrote in and said they felt the shaking was caused by overeating. And interestingly, all of those breeders were bull terrier breeders. I mean, there were a couple hundred responses, and it's not like it was mostly bull terrier people. It was proportionately probably the same amount of bull terrier people as there are bull terrier breeders to other breeders.

So it's not like the bull terrier people were overrepresented, so we got a lot of differing points of view from them. I mean, it seems like this is a phenomenon definitely recognized in our breed. Overeating is not something that I have controlled for, so I do wonder if it's possible that once they're eating on their own, they're capable of just getting more food down their gullet more quickly, than would be possible while nursing.

The last few litters I've had have been less eager to take food early in general and been less, I would say gluttonous than my previous litters. So there's that. Maybe. Maybe there is something to this. Maybe those puppies were self-regulating in a way that some of my other litters didn't. I also have become a lot more methodical about my weaning process and how I introduce food, and I tend to build it up much more slowly than I used to, instead of just throwing a plate of slop at the puppies, I'm adding small amounts of different foods over time, so it's possible that that's a contributing reason why I haven't seen it in my most recent litters.

It's not something I've tracked in the past this over eating, but it's an interesting theory and I'm going to pay more attention to it in the future. I was so fascinated by this conversation that I put up a poll to see how prevalent the phenomenon was. Now, if I had been clever, I would have given a choice for no, I've never seen this phenomenon, but I didn't make that one of the choices, so I didn't capture that data. I can say just from the comments that were made that many, if not most, of the total litters in the world do not do this. And for sure not every litter will do it. I would say I've seen it in about 25% of my own litters.

So a total of 232 people answered this poll. And here's what they said: 131 breeders, 56% said that they had seen this phenomenon after eating, 43 breeders, 19% said they had seen it when putting the puppy in a new room or space, 40 breeders, 17% said they had seen it when placing a puppy on a new surface, nine breeders, 4% had seen it when a puppies lifted, six breeders, 3% noticed it when meeting new people. And then two breeders, 1% of the total saw it, when giving puppies a new toy or sensory object.

So this was a really interesting discussion. If you're on any of our Facebook discussion groups, please do stop by and share your experience. If you're not already part of our discussion groups, you can go to our fan page, Puppy Culture on Facebook. We did have this discussion there as well, but I can't recommend enough that you join one of our discussion groups.

You don't need to be part of our courses to join the Puppy Culture discussion group on Facebook. And if you ask anybody who's part of these groups, they're going to tell you, these are great, safe spaces for intelligent conversation about dogs.

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Check them out at puppyculture.com. Well, that's it for this time. Thanks for listening. Bye bye.