Here at Marble Mountain Kennels, we put on a positive face when it comes to canine pregnancies and deliveries in our blogs, website publications, and personal email announcements. But, since many of you are long-time followers of our blogs and you’ve become personal friends, I feel it might be time to be a little more open and honest and publish a few blogs about some of the realities of everyday life here on the “farm.” It’s not all cute puppies, happy wagging tails and darling fuzzy faces. We have our fair share of dirty, messy, and sometimes nail-biting experiences working with dogs and one of the most stressful can be canine labors and deliveries when things don’t go smoothly.
Thankfully, most of our mama dogs have had easy, problem-free labors and deliveries (L&Ds) and, thankfully, Pete has taken classes and read a lot about canine reproduction and how to prepare for the worst in difficult L&D situations. In spite of many years of experience and education, however, we truly could not survive without the close relationship we have with our local veterinarian, Dr. Art Spencer, whose clinic is located less than ten minutes from our kennel. More times than we can count, Dr. Spencer has met us on weekends and even in the middle of the night to help us out. And, those times when he has been unavailable in person, Art has been with us on the phone, giving us step-by-step instructions in how to care for various emergency needs of our dogs.
When a pregnant dam is nearing her due date, we make sure she is securely housed and comfortable in our birthing kennel and we start looking for common labor signs, such as not eating, pacing, shivering, panting, and squatting. Sometimes we take a dog’s temperature, but it’s usually not necessary. Most of the time, a dog has no trouble whelping pups and we often wake up to newborn puppies after the mama has labored through the night, giving birth while we slept.
But there have been those tension-filled times when a mama dog has been laboring too long. Often it’s just a stalled labor due to the cessation of uterine contractions, in which case we give her an injection of Pitocin to get labor going again, but sometimes there’s a turned or oversized puppy stuck in the birth canal, which means reaching in and feeling for the pup to find out where it is, how it’s turned, how big it is, and somehow find a way to dislodge the little guy. Personally, I (Julie) have a hard time getting a good grip on a slippery pup in stage 3 labor. Pete is better at it. But, there are times when we can’t get a puppy to budge at all, in which case we call Doc Spencer and rush the dam to the veterinary clinic. Only twice in all of our years as breeders has any dog needed a cesarean section and, in both cases, the mama dogs were saved, along with their pups.
Speaking of pups, there are occasionally those times when newborns are not thriving and need intensive care. When a puppy isn’t breathing, is gasping for breath, or is cold and bluish, we have an emergency kit ready. Rubbing a puppy in a soft cloth is a first response to warm him up. We also suction fluid out of a puppy’s nose and mouth and give him mouth to muzzle when necessary. Swinging a pup to get fluids moving out of the lungs is a technique we learned from Danna, Dr. Spencer’s wife. Administering CPR with a gentle, steady pulse to a pup’s heart has saved many a life. If a puppy is still cold and unresponsive, we submerge all but the face in a tub of warm water and continue CPR. You’d be surprised how many “dead” puppies are revived with this procedure Pete learned in his EMT training.
Sometimes a weak pup is not strong enough to nurse properly. In these situations, we sometimes “milk” the mama dog and put drops of the fluid in a puppy’s mouth, but if that is not sufficient, we try bottle feeding warmed puppy formula or raw goat’s milk from our kind neighbors, the Robustellini family or the Monday family. When we’ve put the puppy back with its mother several times and the pup still won’t latch on and nurse, we resort to subcutaneous saline hydration. (Thanks again to Doc Spencer who taught us how to do this at home!) When a puppy reaches this point, there is about a 50% chance of saving her life, so it can be an all night or all day intensive care process of warming and rewarming saline bags, slow saline drip, attempts at bottle feeding, massage, gentle CPR, and occasional mouth to muzzle to try to revive a pup. Partly from grief and partly from sheer exhaustion, we have shed more than a few tears around here from the loss of a newborn pup with failure to thrive (FTT) and it usually occurs within the first twenty-four hours of a puppy’s birth.
On the upside, though, we’re happy to report that we have experienced fewer and fewer infant puppy losses over the years, as we have become more adept at reading the signs of FTT and are able to incorporate quick, innovative techniques to save lives. We are always awe-inspired to watch a pup grow to be strong, playful, robust and healthy when it looked like there was no hope.
