Lot's to think about!
This content represents the opinions of experienced PBGV breeders. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional veterinary advice. Always seek the advice of your veterinarian with any questions you may have regarding the health of your PBGV.
You can always count on a PBGV for surprises and a pregnant PBGV is no exception. Here is the story of our first litter.
My very first surprise came in the breeding process. Helen told me, the dogs know when they are doing – Let them! So, in spite of all my reading and “book learning” and concern about hormone levels and which day of Maya’s season it was, I just sat back and watched as Freddie and Maya taught me how it was supposed to be done.
Maya was very anxious. She made I clear that she was ready. I thought she was ready, but Freddie would check her out and walk away. Maddening for Maya, maddening for me. I thought Freddie was young. Did he really know what he was doing? I put them together every day, and every day Freddie said “Not yet.”
On the afternoon of the 13th day, I was sitting at my desk. Freddie had rejected Maya in the morning and I hadn’t planned to bring her out again. Suddenly Freddie came flying into my office and started scratching my leg frantically. I thought he needed to go outside, so I went with him as he flew down the stairs … and straight to Maya’s kennel. If a dog’s look can say, “Open the kennel, what are you waiting for? She’s ready!!!” - then that is the look he gave me.
My first lesson in Dog Breeding 101: Listen to the dog.
Then it was time to play the waiting game. Was she pregnant? She acted differently, I thought. But the Vet said the bitch’s hormone levels stay high whether they are pregnant or not. (So that’s why we can’t have them pee on a stick like humans. Standard blood and urine tests don’t work well with dogs.)
When she stopped eating, I figured something was up. And she was clearly nauseous. Have you ever seen such a furry face go completely green at the thought of food? It’s a look only someone who has had a baby can completely empathize with. Oh, why hadn’t I let her pack on the weight when she was really hungry during her season? Now she refused dog food of any kind including her beloved Bil-Joc.
This went on from Week 2 through Week 8. Why on earth couldn’t she eat? Was it a bad pregnancy? Was she absorbing the pups? Well-meaning friends, breeders and the vet suggested all kinds of ideas, but they had no idea the extent of the problem. “Oh, just give her a little canned food. Let her have some cottage cheese.” Or even worse. “Oh, she’ll eat when she is ready.”
For almost two weeks, she ate very little. She was in a reasonably good mood. She drank plenty of water, but she wasn’t hungry. I was at my wit’s end. I even squirted Nurtri-Cal in her mouth trying to make sure she got some kind of nutrition. (She hated that) After a couple of weeks, she would sometimes accept a little pure protein: cooked chicken, a little beef, some turkey. Almost nothing worked twice in a row. If she like chicken one day, she refused it the next. Chicken livers were the only food that I could count on if she wasn’t feeling nauseous, but too many gave her diarrhea so I had to limit how much of the them I offered her. It was a bad time around our house. I didn’t know if I had a sick dog, a pregnant dog, or a miscarrying dog.
After an ultrasound confirmed the presence of five wriggling pups and the vet gave her a clean bill of health, I knew I had the world’s fussiest pregnant dog. Getting her to eat was such a trial I almost vowed to never let her get pregnant again.
We got another interesting piece of news from the vet that day. He was almost certain that there were a pair of twins in the bunch. Two of the pups seemed to share one embryonic sac and one placenta. That would men they are coming from the division of one egg rather than from individual eggs like their siblings. They were smaller than the others.
About three days before she delivered, I found Maya sniffing at the bag of puppy food I had brought home. I held out a handful and to my surprise, she ate it. I gave her a cupful. She ate it. I was thrilled, but she didn’t repeat the performance the next day. All she accepted was a small amount of turkey.
The night before Maya whelped, she insisted on sleeping in our room, a rare occurrence. She curled up on a bed next to my side of the bed, and I woke through the night and checked her. About 4 am, she seemed to get more restless. Her contractions were growing steadier, and I thought it was time to settle her into the whelping box. I took her down to the breezeway area that had been set aside for her. She settled right in as if she suddenly realized what the place was for. I made coffee, re-read the whelping books and got out towels and other supplies. She dozed between contractions. About 9:30, things quickly escalated. The first pup arrived at 9:45 am. Maya gave a tiny whelp as he was delivered, but that was the only complaint I heard from her. She spuing into action: cleaning the whelp, chewing his cord, eating the placenta. I helped but she was clearly in charge.
She delivered all five pups in just over an hour. I helped more with the third pup because it came so quickly after the second. Then we both got a small break, maybe five minutes. Numbers four and five came quickly, and suddenly it was over. Throughout her labor, I had tried to determine how may placentas there were, but Maya was so quick to clean the pup and eat the placenta, I never had a chance. We lined everyone up in their birth order to photograph them, so we had a record of their markings. Two pups had similar marking and were smaller than the others, but I didn’t think any of them had identical markings. I couldn’t tell if we had twins or not. Maya was busy cleaning them and encouraging them to nurse. She was all attentiveness and action.
It had been a picture-perfect delivery.
But, as the day wore on, I saw that all was not entirely well. One pup was clearly struggling. I kept her extra warm and tried to get her to nurse. I made sure her passages were clear. That is when I saw it. A severe cleft palate in the mouth of an otherwise gorgeous puppy. I called the vet, tucked her into my sweater and headed to his office.
The vet had immediately gotten on-line, consulted with the Virgina Tech veterinary hospital and when I got there he was ready to look at her.
I was precisely the type of cleft he didn’t want to see – wide open from front to back. He took a picture and sent it to the consulting vet. The word came back, you probably don’t want to try to fix this. It’s too severe. Reluctantly, we had her put down.
I have since done a lot of reading about clefts. They are often genetic, though not always. Some breeds have a lot of problems with them. Fortunately, Petits aren’t one of those breeds. Some say that dogs can do fine with a cleft palate as long as they get only hard food – never anything soft that might clog the opening. Others say that it might be fixed probably in two operations. A front cleft is easier to repair that a cleft that is farther back in the mouth. But when both are present, success rates decline severely. And she would have had to tube fed for six to eight weeks before she could even undergo the attempt. Both vets were kind. They offered to work out payments for the costly surgery if I really wanted to try. But they also speculated that if she had this defect, what other defects might we find as she grows? Was she perhaps one of the twins who hadn’t developed properly? And then would I keep her forever? I couldn’t sell her and I certainly wouldn’t feel comfortable pass to her onto someone else’s care. Dogs who have survived with cleft palates often suffer from respiratory and sinus issues.
In the end, I think what I did was best. It’s one of the saddest and most troubling parts of being a breeder. You have to make decisions that are best for everyone concerned.
I came home without her. Maya didn’t seem to pay much attention at first, being busy with the other four. But later, when I got her away from them to go outside, she came back in and went on a thorough search of the house, checking every single room. I assume she was looking for her puppy. Then she came back, threw herself back into mothering the others and that was the end of it.
The next day, Maya got up and started throwing her food bowl around. I filled it with dog food and she downed it. I filled it again and she finished it off again. She has not missed a meal since.
Nursing went well; everyone thrived and grew. Then it came time to start the pups on solid food. I made a classic gruel. They weren’t interested. I tried another recipe. They didn’t want it. Buy Maya really wanted it. She didn’t want them to eat. She stubbornly fought me every step of the way. I had to lock her out to give the pups a chance at it. But they just wanted Mom. What had I done? Produced another generation of finicky eaters?
Then one day, when they were almost five weeks, I discovered all the puppies intent on licking something on the floor in the nest. Another pile was nearby. It turns out Maya had regurgitated her food for them. To them this was real eating. Far more appealing than my miserable attempt at dinner.
Still, I thought it was time for them to learn to eat what I made them. It took another week until they finally made the shift to my food and Maya finally started cooperating with me. But still I wondered about it. Again, I read everything I could find. Some breeders and vets insist you must start puppies at 3 weeks with some form of food. Other vets and breeders insist that milk is fine by itself for as long as 6 weeks. I remembered back to my days of raising children and how the wisdom 25 years ago was that babies went on food at 3 weeks. Nowadays, of course, human babies start on solid food much later.
I think that in this case, Maya had a small litter with more than enough milk to keep everyone happy. She also was a very natural mother who wanted to pick the time for moving them to solid food herself. Next time, I think I will simply let the scale decide. If the pups are happy and gaining adequately and the bitch is still looking good, I am going to let her stay in charge of their meal plan.
As newbies, we found it fascinating and a little frustrating to evaluate our little litter. One puppy had a glorious head. One more a perpetually comical look on his face. One was the picture of her mother. One was the biggest and boldest. Who would stand out? Who would be a pet? Who would be a show prospect?
The first decision was easy. The comical looking puppy was truly hilarious. A great personality, extreme curiosity, but not big, bold make that the show ring called for. He went to friends who had followed the pregnancy closely and gotten a chance to know every one of the puppies. I thought of him as their puppy right from the start so it wasn’t too hard to see him go. I smile when I think of him with them.
The second decision was much harder. Our big, bold male was turning out to be everything we hoped he would be (at least as much as you can tell at 10 weeks). But we didn’t want to keep a male, so we sent him to a wonderful show home. The house was horribly quiet after he left. In addition to his good looks, he had his dad’s “the world is my oyster” attitude. Back home, we felt we had lost our ring leader. We all mourned his departure. My husband took it especially hard.
Now we are down to the two girls. We wanted to keep only one. But their styles are so different, we still can’t figure out which to keep. So they are going to grow up here for a while. We have someone who’d like a pet and she comes to play with them, so maybe one will eventually go to her. We’ll see. I think we were lucky to have a small litter the first time out. We had the chance to really study everyone and not feel the street of getting a tone of puppies out of our house and into new homes. We had the luxury of feeling everyone could stay if we wanted them to, no t so if we had a litter of nine or ten!
I adored every minute of raising this litter. There is so much more to say about the experience of it all that I could go on for much longer. The pure moments of tenderness between Maya and her babies. The pure hilarity of taking them all to visit Santa at the mall. But there is a little sadness tinged with joy. Would I do it again? A million times over.
I learned two major lessons from Maya and her puppies. The first is Trust your Dogs. They know a lot. I still don’t understand why Maya wouldn’t eat and she probably thinks I am an idiot for not knowing what she needed. But many other times when the books and I were looking at things one way and she was looking at them another, Maya was the one who was right. Her instincts were spectacular. We are lucky that we still have a breed with good heads on their shoulders.
The other lesson I learned is this: breeding is not for wimps. It’s a big responsibility to hold all those littles in the palm of your hands. It is for you to make the hard calls. It is for you to decide where these little ones will spend their lives. They look to you with such love and trust and you have to face them and know that you have to live up to that.
I visited my little show male the other day. He immediately recognized me and jumped into my lap. But instead of doing the jumping and licking routine, he leaned his head on my chest and looked into my face. He actually gazed into my eyes, as if saying “Hay, I know you. I’m glad to see you. Are we going home how?”
And when I left him, with tears in my eyes, we looked deeply into each other’s eyes again. I chucked him under the chin and said “You’ve got a great life here.” I like to think he understood and believed me. H watched me all the way out the driveway, but just as I lost sight of him, I saw him turn and run, tail wagging into the arms of his new mom.