Happy Birfday, Chunk Muffin!
Heart of Gold is two weeks old – Happy Birfday, silly little chunky muffin!
Here’s the whole photoset, on Flickr.
Puppy Woes and Vets with Bad People Skills
Sorry for being missing in action, but Penelope’s puppies came down with diarrhea, and caring for them has been consuming pretty much every minute of my time.
We first noticed it on Sunday afternoon, but by the early hours of Monday morning their poo issues had escalated from ‘worrisome’ to ‘alarming’. Because puppies have lowered immune systems and no fat reserves to draw on, diarrhea can send a healthy puppy into a tail spin within 12 hours. Just like with human babies, the main concern is dehydration. Dehydrated puppies can crash with stunning rapidity, so I spend all of the late hours of Sunday and the early hours of Monday monitoring them for it.
The smallest girl, who has always been significantly more petite in both size and weight than her siblings, had the hardest time of it. By 8 am Monday morning, she’d had two rounds of subcutaneous fluids, and was nursing with lackluster enthusiasm. I knew I had to get a stool sample in as soon as possible, to find out what the problem was, and to try and learn how we could treat it.
Like a lot of breeders, I use two different veterinarians on a regular basis. My ‘main’ vet is my reproductive specialist, who I use for everything and anything breeding related. They do our c-sections, our timing tests, our inseminations and our semen storage. However, since they’re an hour away, I’ve used a local veterinarian for some of the smaller, more minor issues that come up with our dogs, such as xrays, cremation for Ellie and shots of oxytocin when Penelope’s milk wouldn’t come in. Since they’re in Durham, just five minutes away from me, they seemed the logical choice for doing a stool culture. I called and asked them if I could come in, then groggily jumped in the car, carrying my tupperware container of puppy poo.
When I arrived at the clinic, the receptionist was (and I’m understating here) remarkably chilly. She took my sample into the back to hand off to the vet, while I arranged to pick up a new bag of ringers and some needle tips from the vet tech. Just as she was ringing me in, I heard the male veterinarian loudly asking “Why I’d bothered bringing the sample to them, if they weren’t good enough to be my regular vet”. The receptionist returned, carrying my poo, and haughtily told me that, “since their clinic obviously wasn’t skilled enough to be my regular clinic, and couldn’t possibly be able to know what to look for in the sample, maybe I should just take it up to my real vet”. While reading the preceding sentence, make sure to imbue it with as much hostile sarcasm as possible, for full effect.
I was stunned and surprised, which coming on top of a full weekend of sleep deprivation, and a full night of caring for sick puppies, was a very bad combination indeed. I asked if she thought my ‘real’ clinic would complain when I took my new pigs to Durham, then answered my own question by saying “Oh, wait, of course they won’t be, because they understand that different vets have different specialities — I don’t take my large animals to my repro vet, and I don’t let my large animal vet do c sections on my French Bulldogs”. I then stomped out of the clinic, an effect that was probably spoiled by the fact that I was so tired I bumped into the door frame.
I just don’t understand what they were trying to prove. Would they rather have none of my money than some of it? Is it inconceivable to them that, for a dog breeder, there’s nothing unusual in having different veterinarians for different needs? I’m a good client. I pay all of my (rather large) bills as they’re presented to me, I’m on time, I listen politely, and I follow directions. Most of all, I have a lot of four legged creatures for them to treat. Their loss, I suppose, although it didn’t feel like it when I was careening up the highway to my ‘real’ veterinarian to have them check the sample.
The stool sample results have thankfully come back negative. The puppies don’t have an illness, or a parasite, meaning that this is one of those cases of ‘mystery poo’ that plague dog breeders from time to time. Possibly it was related to Penelope’s milk, although we cultured that as well, with nothing seen in the results. Mom and pups are on a low dose of antibiotics as a sort of ‘just in case, and it couldn’t hurt’ precaution, and everyone seems to be coming around quite nicely. Even the tiny little terror is back to head bopping her siblings if they get in her way. I’m still watching over them rather obsessively – I even had Sean take a few days off work to help me, so I could get some sleep.
The tiny girl is now seriously tiny in comparison to her siblings. While they’re sitting at about 14 ounces and change, she’s just under 11. I suppose that this officially means that the tiny girl is a ‘runt’, much as I loathe that word. I especially hate it when people contact me and tell me that they’re looking for ‘just a runt’, as if this small little girl, who I’ve watched over constantly, weighed three times per day, and who sleeps in the crook of my arm when she tires of nursing, is some sort of defective goods. She might be small, but she’s a defiant little fighter who latches on to a nipple with the suction force of a Dyson vacuum, her tiny face wrinkled in concentration. Far from being ‘just a runt’, she is instead just about my favorite.
Upstairs, and out of the fray of multiple siblings, Heart continues to grow. We’ve taken to making little Jabba the Hut jokes when we visit with her, parroting her saying things like “Feed me again you shall, HaHaHa”. It’s a Star Wars geek thing.
Here’s an interesting photo — it shows the clear differences in coat color between the tiny girl, who I now think will be a honey pied, and her (literally) big sister, who is going to be a sort of caramel colored cream. The color differences between all four pups are now quite striking, if you look closely enough.
Oh, and email? Yes I know you’re there, all 268 new messages in my inbox. Give me time to sort through them all, please — I’ve been living in one single small room for three days straight, so my mind isn’t quite where it should be just yet.
Here’s the entire photo set, on Flickr. More of Heart some time later this week.
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Little Miss Chunky Butt Opens Her Eyes
Princess Chunky Butt is growing by leaps and bounds, not all of them merely in terms of her girth, either.
Her widdle eyes are open (first one yesterday evening, second one this morning), so no more flash photography for a while, which means any photos will be a bit dark and grainy. She’s also super quick at crawling around, and can find her way to Tula’s most readily available nipple in record speed. As a singleton, she’s pretty much used to getting her own way, and squawks up a storm if you pick her up or do anything to thwart her attempts to get to where she wants to go.
As we learned with Delilah and Solo (ok, mostly with Delilah) singletons are a special kind of dog. Affectionate and loving, for sure, but used to getting their own way, and sometimes less than cognizant of the fact that they are actually dogs, and not small people in fur coats. Because of this, I’ve been contemplating putting two of the largest of Nell’s puppies in with her.
Penelope has tons of milk, but she’s a rather lackadaisical mother. She cleans the pups, but she’d rather sleep on the floor than in the whelping box, and if one of them starts crying, eh – that’s what the nanny (meaning me) is for. Tula, on the other hand, would eat through the door if she heard her puppy crying on the other side of it, and Heart is so clean you’d think she’d been put through a car wash. If we moved the two largest pups, the smaller ones would have a chance to nurse more readily, Penelope would have less work to do, and Heart would have some siblings to both keep her company, and give her a run for her money in the competition department.
I haven’t quite decided yet if I’ll do so, but it’s a possibility.
The rest of the photos are over here on Flickr, and here’s a little video with her Royal Cute-i-Tude showing off her crawling, wiggling, rolling over skills – and her open eyes! Music is by Feist, because Sean was in the background yapping to me about laundry, and no one needs to listen to that..
Birthday Girl and Puppy Pix
Barb pointed out to me that I forgot to mention that Penelope’s pups share a birthday – with Penelope! They were born two years to the day from Penelope. What a nice birthday present!
Penelope has lots of milk now, and the pups are thriving. She’s not quite got the knack of the whole cleaning them off thing, however, so I’m spending a lot of time dabbing them off with wet wipes. This is especially noticeable on the creams, who seem to have a penchant for pooping on each other, and for managing to get themselves covered in Penelope’s blood. Nothing says adorable like poopy pups with blood spattered heads!
The creams are darkening up already, and on the largest girl you can already see a tan colored dorsal stripe up her back. As they age, they’ll gradually look less white, and more a pale golden color.
More photos of Penelope’s kids are here, on Flickr.
Don’t think I’ve forgotten about little Heart! She celebrated her one week birthday yesterday, and if it’s possible, she’s gotten even cuter. She has definately gotten fatter, that’s for sure, and it’s no wonder since Tula is giving enough milk to feed an entire herd of dairy cattle.
Her nose freckles are getting more noticeable, which is good – we want her nose to fill in completely, until it’s totally black.
She’s not just a pretty puppy, either – she’s a calm, mellow, content little baby. She rarely cries, she’s not fussy and she’s happy to be picked up. She’s not slow, either – she’s vigorous and crawls enthusiastically. All together she’s been a joy to watch growing up, and it’s hard to resist kissing her on the forehead every time I see her.
Look at this face – who wouldn’t want to smooch it?
More photos of Heart and Tula are here, and if I get time (and a nap) I’ll shoot some video tonight.
By the way, if you’ve phoned or emailed I am not ignoring you — I’m just a little swamped at the moment, between caring for two litters on two floors, and trying to get in some work when I get a chance. Bear with me — things will be better by middle of next week, and I’ll try to get caught up on replies and return phone calls by then.
Penelope Got Milk
Well, that sucked. Penelope had a little colostrum at the clinic, so I came home sure that nursing wouldn’t be an issue for her.
Wrong. What little liquid she had dried up, and around four am I had some screaming mad, super hungry puppies to contend with, and no mommy milk to offer them. That’s when I remembered I had a walking dairy bar sitting upstairs. I packed up the kids, and took them up to Tula, who after an initial reaction that clearly said “Where the hell did all of these come from?”, calmly proceeded to clean them, nurse them, and nudge them into a tidy little pile, with Heart smack in the middle of it.
While this might seem like a solution to the problem, it’s really not. Newborn puppies don’t need milk – they need colostrum. Colostrum is the liquid gold that new moms produce in the first 24 to 48 hours after delivery. It’s a thin, watery consistency with an almost pale yellow color, unlike the rich white milk mom will eventually produce. It’s vitally important that puppies receive it, for several reasons.
Colostrum info on Wikipedia —
Colostrum is high in carbohydrates, protein, and antibodies and low in fat (as human newborns may find fat difficult to digest). Newborns have very small digestive systems, and colostrum delivers its nutrients in a very concentrated low-volume form. It has a mild laxative effect, encouraging the passing of the baby’s first stool, which is called meconium. This clears excess bilirubin, a waste product of dead red blood cells which is produced in large quantities at birth due to blood volume reduction, from the infant’s body and helps prevent jaundice. Colostrum contains all five immunoglobulins found in all mammals, IgA, IgD, IgE, IgG and IgM. There are many beneficial proteins in the colostrum, including a variety of growth factors (IGfs).
One of the most important aspects of colostrum ingestion is that it passes on maternal antibodies to the puppies. These are what protect the puppies from diseases and infections until they receive their first shots. So, even though Tula would have been happy to continue feeding the pups, I knew I had to get Penelope’s milk flowing.
First thing in the morning, I was on the phone to our vet’s office, hoping they could provide me with some shots of oxytocin so I could kick start Penelope’s colostrum production. Oxytocin is a naturally occurring hormone that aids whelping by stimulating the uterus, and assists in the let down of milk. A subcutaneous injection of oxytocin can help to stimulate milk in bitches with sluggish production.
First shot, and nothing. I urged Penelope to drink, repeatedly urged the puppies to nurse, and crossed my fingers hard. Second shot, and this time the pups were much more interested in nursing. A check revealed that Penelope was finally producing colostrum, albeit not as much as I’d like, but a small amount goes a long way, so I was finally able to breathe again.
Here’s a short video of the pups enjoying their first real nurse on mom. Me, I’m off to have a nap, and explain to Tula that she can’t keep the extra puppies after all. Poor little Heart, no puppy pile to snuggle in…