Oh Yeah, You Blend

The C litter are five days old and everybody is doing great! Zhora is being an incredible mother, just as her mother was. You have to love a dog who is an excellent mother. The puppies had their first nail trim on Sunday because they were scratching her, poor thing, but even then she was still caring for them, but I noticed she wasn’t snuggling as much, and sure enough, she had little scratches. The funny thing is that Zhora has always taken a rather…laid back approach to her own personal care (she is so icky when she’s in season), but she has kept her puppies immaculately clean. She potties them religiously and there’s never even a drop of urine or poop in the box, but her own lochia (normal post-whelping vaginal discharge)…well that’s my job to clean up. But the puppies are always spotless.

Weights today are:

Ruffles – 410 grams (13% gain since yesterday morning!)

Orson – 444 grams (10 % gain)

Chex – 380 grams ( 15 % gain)

Frito – 364 grams (18 % gain)

Popcorn – 226 grams (21.5% gain), and that’s without ANY supplementation so far today!

As you can see, Popcorn is the big winner here! Everybody gained nicely, but I really feel like maybe she’s got ahead of her setback now! She’s feisty and active and LOVES her sponge feedings, she gets a nice little “pit” in her cheeks that shows she has a good latch and is nursing hard, she kneads my fingers with her little front feet, and she gets quite annoyed when it’s over, squeaking and complaining and not wanting to let go, even though her little tummy is obviously full! We will try to video a sponge feeding so you can see what I’m talking about. Since I will start feeding everyone one meal a day this way to help with bonding, they’ll be having this regularly.

Here’s my Deep Thoughts for today (I actually got a chunk of uninterrupted sleep last night for the first time in nearly a week, I’ve been averaging 3.5 hours a night per my Fitbit so a decent sleep is huge and my brain feels somewhat functional again): the more experience I get, the less I try to judge others. Because what’s right for me isn’t right for everyone. Now many breeders simply don’t supplement the teeny tiny puppies, and the truth is that most of them (in this breed anyway) really will pull through even if it takes them a while. There’s NOTHING wrong with that. My own view, what works for me, is that especially in a case like Popcorn’s, where it seemed to me that she had several things working against her (recap below), I felt that any extra care I could give her that might help her make it, was warranted. I brought this puppy into the world, she’s my responsibility until the day she dies, and I need to be able to look at myself in the mirror and know I did all I could for her. Many breeders feel you need to let puppies sink or swim on their own, and that is certainly a valid opinion.

What I Think Happened With Popcorn:

• she had a poor spot in the uterus so she was small at birth (much of the time when people use the word “runt”, what they are really talking about is a puppy who didn’t get a uterine implantation spot with ideal blood supply, these puppies don’t have anything genetically or congenitally wrong with them, they just tend to be smaller than their littermates who had better spots to gestate in). Is she the smallest Vallhund puppy I know of? No, but she’s close!
• she was in there for several hours waiting to be born, when we checked her heart rate when we first arrived at the vet clinic, it was over 200, which is normal (I was actually worried she might be dead already, but she wasn’t!), but after unsuccessfully trying to get her out medically and manually, it started dropping and so we decided to go to surgery
• As it turned out, her neighbor puppy’s placenta hadn’t been expelled (the three boys all came within half an hour, and Zhora was grabbing and eating the placentas so fast I wasn’t sure if we had all of them out, and we didn’t), which was blocking her from being born – she was very high up in one horn so had a long distance to travel to the exit, and she hadn’t even been able to start making her way down, because Zhora was pushing against a stuck placenta roadblock
• her sac had ruptured, so she had very little lubrication to ease her movement, and she was so high up there’s no way we could have got lubrication up to her
• Zhora was tiring – she’d been pushing for nearly 6 hours, and in stage 2 (active) labor for nearly 8 hours by the time we went to surgery. This was not because Zhora “couldn’t” whelp her naturally (she free whelped the other 4 just fine), but because there was a mechanical blockage stopping her from getting Popcorn out
• so in addition to having a very hard time being born, when she finally WAS out, she’d had a dose of anesthetic (very small, Dr Gray, Renee and the other techs did an awesome job), and when you’ve never taken a breath in your life and then get anesthetic, it is that much harder to get going
• Dr Gray helped us make sure she nursed as soon as she and Zhora were awake enough, so that she got colostrum – which is VITALLY important
• So all those things conspired to set her back, but she’s a fighter! And because she wasn’t giving up, I wasn’t either so:
• she was dehydrated, so I gave subcutaneous, warmed, sterile fluids (Lactated Ringers if you’re interested), via a scalp vein catheter (this is a “butterfly” catheter, with a very small needle, and easier to manage with a teeny tiny puppy than a needle directly attached to a syringe)
• she was expending most of the calories she was taking in by nursing, and she wasn’t gaining any weight at all for the first couple of days, which was making me nervous (it’s normal for them to lose on the first day, but then they should start gaining), so I tube fed her two to three times a day for a few days (tube feeding means the puppy gets the formula directly into her stomach by way of a tiny tube you pass through their mouth – they don’t like it, but it’s extremely effective and very safe if done properly). We’ve now switched to sponge feeding and I am going to try feeding her just one meal today and see how her weight does.
• we also placed her on the nipples which had the most milk and the easiest milk letdown (these are usually the inguinal teats, closest to the mother’s back legs)
• I gave her liver water and Nutri Drops
• we tried to strike a balance between allowing her to be a normal puppy of this age, having to push through her siblings to get to the milk bar, having to defend her spot at the milk bar, nursing naturally as much as she wanted to etc. (all of which are important for her mental and physical development) and making sure she got the most calories into her possible (which is important for her survival!) with supplemental feedings and moving her to the “choice” nipples
• I won’t say she’s out of the woods, but I think we can see the light at the end of the tunnel (mixed metaphors for the win)
• I haven’t started Early Neurological Stimulation with her yet, but if she continues to gain, I will likely start it tomorrow

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 26th, 2017 at 12:06 PM and is filed under breeding, C litter, dogs, puppies, vallhunds, Zhora. 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.