Normal Birth in Dogs Preparations for Whelping: Begin preparations for delivery of puppies before the female gives birth. A whelping box should be provided for the mother to being sleeping in to ensure the birth of the puppies in the area you have chosen. This box should be relatively small, with sides 6 to 8 […]
Category Archives: Reproduction
I received a question on this today, so I will post the handouts we use here at KVC. This is the first of three. Normal Gestation in Dogs Gestation is the period when the young are developing in the mother’s uterus. In dogs, gestation normally lasts 9 weeks (63 days). However, puppies may be delivered […]
Once upon a time, I wrote a post on weird-looking dogs. One of the most unsound breeds is the English Bulldog. Because of their extreme conformation, the males are rarely able to breed the females with natural service. Their chests are too big and their hindquarters are too small, and they just cannot assume the […]
That could be a tabloid headline, though I guess it's pretty tame compared to "Elvis sighted in laundromat!" or "Politician actually admits lying!". The point is that it's weird — dogs who have been spayed have no uterus and no ovaries, so how could they still be having estrus cycles and coming "in heat"? Once […]
You know, there are many times when the description you get over the telephone doesn't convey an accurate picture. Maybe the owner doesn't have the scientific vocabulary. Maybe they are in distress about their pet's condition, and they exaggerate. Something that looks terrible to them may not look so bad to me — after all, […]
I just recently posted on eclampsia. I bet I hadn’t seen a case in six months, maybe a year. Tonight I had the third case in two weeks, and all of them pretty good sized dogs. This kid is supposed to be a Chihuahua, but she weighed fifteen pounds. Of course, maybe five pounds of […]
The phone rang at 3:00AM. This is never good: I am not pretty and I need my beauty sleep. "Do you make house-calls?" It turns out the guy got up to use the bathroom and found his dog stiff and twitching uncontrollably. "Is this a female dog?" Yes. "Has she had puppies recently?" Two weeks […]
We tend to think of a "spay" as a routine operation. It’s usually routine for me, as I’ve done hundreds of them — I know what I will do first, what I’ll do second, etc. For the patient, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime major operation — a complete hysterectomy, removing the entire uterus and ovaries. Sometimes it’s […]
This is Lucy. You can easily see that she is a calico cat, so you know that she must be female (since it’s genetically sex-linked: all calico cats are girls). What you can’t see is that she’s only about one year old (she showed up at the owner’s home as a kitten one year ago). […]