Oh Yeah, You Blend

So Dr. Hutchison is SO NICE. I had a great phone consultation with him and I am starting to get excited about this. He says there is no real difference in litter size between natural and frozen semen breedings (differences are more related to the age of the dam, older = smaller litters as a general rule). This week he had four frozen semen litters born with 13, 9, 11 and 10 puppies (not Vallhunds, but those are good litter sizes)! He has had great success with surgical inseminations (he’s done something like 30,000). So I think, when the time comes, Nina and I will take a little trip to Ohio!

Other interesting things I learned from our conversation:

• pre-breeding antibiotics are not useful, but 10-14 days of something like Baytril or Zenequin after breeding can help with implantation rates due to bacteria in the uterine lining and therefore increase the conception rate and litter size
• Pepcid late in pregnancy can reduce the stomach irritation caused by gastrin (which may be part of why Nina didn’t eat well at all in the last couple of weeks)
• increasing food just before/just after breeding can actually increase embryonic deaths, so if you plan to bulk your girl up before a litter, do it well before she comes into season, not just before, and don’t change anything calorie/supplement-wise for the first half of the pregnancy (adding a canine prenatal supplement is a good idea, but other than that, leave well enough alone!)
• they do their surgery right! Catheters and fluids for all anesthetized patents, BP/CO2/EKG/pulse oximetry and someone watching it
• I can watch the procedure!
• there is no difference (averaged out) in male/female puppies in frozen semen breedings, the sperm all freeze at the same rate so you should have the same number of male/female sperm as you’d have in a natural breeding
• we should check that our lab’s progesterone values are the same as theirs, so I guess we’ll test Tish and send one sample to our lab, and one to them!
• they have a greater than 80% success rate with frozen semen breedings
• Tempest’s semen is excellent

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 2nd, 2012 at 4:41 PM and is filed under breeding, dogs, Nina, puppies, vallhunds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.